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Nine inch nails the downward spiral7/26/2023 ![]() ![]() It turned out there was a massive untapped market of teenagers who felt the same frustration and despair, who found themselves stranded in the hinterlands of life, who hated everything but loved to dance about it. Reznor’s rural American alienation glittered in cellophane. With these new collaborators, Nine Inch Nails coiled the clang and scrape of Skinny Puppy and Front 242 tightly around hooks as delicious as anything in Duran Duran’s chart-swallowers-a winning contrast. The fresh FBI file may have boosted Nine Inch Nails’ reputation, but the songs powered themselves: all hard edges and taut screams, galvanized by production assistance from British producer Flood (known for his work with Depeche Mode and Soft Cell) and Adrien Sherwood and Keith Leblanc of the New York industrial hip-hop ensemble Tackhead. Though you can now see the uncut version, MTV ultimately axed the shot of Reznor lying completely dead on the pavement, glooped up in corn starch that suggested early-stage decomposition. The authorities tracked down the very much alive Reznor, who either got the footage back or refilmed it. It helped that some minor controversy attended NIN’s first single: While recording the video for “Down In It,” a weather balloon filming an aerial shot got away from the crew and ended up in the hands of the cops, who took it for a snuff film. Released on the independent label TVT, Pretty Hate Machine moved exponentially more copies than any other record in the proto-industrial scene. He taught himself MIDI and began scratching out the jagged synthpop demos that would ultimately mutate into Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine. He quit that, too, and scooped up a job cleaning toilets at a local recording studio in exchange for a little money and a lot of free studio time. Eventually, he found his way to the Chicago-based industrial label Wax Trax! and their mainstay act Ministry, who taught him that songs could be hideous and irresistible at the same time.Īfter a fleeting college stint, Reznor dropped out in 1984 and moved to Cleveland, where he briefly suffered the humiliation of playing in a new wave band. As a kid, he latched onto the juvenile antics of shock rock outfits like Alice Cooper and KISS that he saw on TV and suggested that something, somewhere, might be happening. He grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where nothing happened. Like his contemporary Kurt Cobain, Reznor came of age gagging at the pap that slicked MTV, the tired rock bands with aerated hair surfing the last dregs of glam. He wrought a lucrative career from a childhood fascination with music he also seethed about the indignities of Reagan-era capitalist machinery only to find himself its shiniest new cog. The sound of metal chewing meat and actual metal chewing actual meat fused together again.īy the time he recorded Broken, Reznor had gotten everything he’d ever wanted and hated it. They made a natural pair: the scrappy, squalling poster boy for the newly mainstreamed industrial movement and the professional masochist who carried on in the tradition of COUM Transmissions, the violent and depraved performance-art collective that gave rise to Throbbing Gristle, the first band to claim “industrial” as a descriptor for themselves. He was likely best known for nailing the head of his penis to a board in front of a live audience to Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” that’s how Trent Reznor heard of him, anyway. The man fed to the machine is played by Bob Flanagan, a performance and video artist who lived with cystic fibrosis and made gruesomely provocative art from his station inside the late 20th century’s techno-medical apparatus. Because Reznor has a better handle on dynamics now, the melodic core is more obvious than ever.This is “Happiness in Slavery,” the revolting, hypnotizing, beautiful video that accompanied Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP in 1992. Suddenly the guitars fall away to reveal the sensually throbbing rhythm track below then that falls away to reveal a vocal-and-piano track that's as catchy as anything by Elton John. On the album's first single, "March of the Pigs," for example, Reznor screams about swine lined up for slaughter amid guitars screeching in pain. The Downward Spiral, Reznor builds his constructions of noise and gloom around warm, fuzzy melodies. Trent Reznor, who records the NIN albums almost entirely by himself (although he tours with a full band), tries very hard to pass himself off as an angry young man, but underneath the angst-ridden lyrics, pounding synths, and grating guitars is an irrepressible pop sensibility. It's easy to understand why Nine Inch Nails became the industrial band to break out of the techno ghetto and win a larger audience. ![]()
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