- 22nd August 2008
I began to weep with the first drumbeat. The gurgling, pre-recorded, public address system-blasted strains of “999,999”—which sounds very much like a man overpowered, dragged underwater by an inexorable force to a place familiar, yet undesirable—had faded in so gradually that neither the audience in general nor I had noticed it (the song) until it was almost over. When the erumpent catharsis of “1,000,000” began, I was taken more or less unawares, entirely emotionally unsteeled for the event. In my defense, however, I hadn’t expected that I would need to be emotionally steeled for an arena rock concert. But such was the case. I found myself disappointingly unable to sing along with the taut, snare-driven lamentation juggernaut that is “1,000,000.” I felt the guitarist’s staccato upward strumming in my cervical spine, the bass in the balls of my feet. But I found myself without breath, as if I’d been mulekicked in the solar plexus; I was possessed of a quivering goateed chin which belied my set jaw as I teared profusely, gracelessly, embarrassingly, until my contact lenses drifted away from my irises and into inutility over the sclera. I cried through seven numbers of the thirty-song set and it wasn’t until the seventh lachrymal episode—two hours and six sweaty minutes into the airfield-loud show, during the last song altogether—that I understood what was going on.
In what had amounted to a four-hundred dollar excursion, I’d taken Friday, August 22nd off from my table-waiting gig to catch the Cleveland date of the grandiose spectacle that was Nine Inch Nails’ Lights in the Sky Over North America tour—alongside debacles like Pink Floyd’s ’80-’81Wall tour, and U2′s Pop tour, one of the most elaborate and complexly executed series of rock shows ever presented. Around eleven-thirty the previous evening, I’d set out from upstate New York and driven alone through the relative tranquility and inky gloom of the wee hours, alone and without directions to a city I’d never navigated and in which I knew no one. I hadn’t taken a Friday night away from my restaurant in four years and, generally speaking, I don’t particularly care for live music—the din and stink of the crowd repels me and the music, regardless of the performers’ instrumental acumen, always seems less precise, less deliberate, less lush than the studio-executed recordings. But I had a vague idea of the scale of the production and I felt certain that I’d regret it if I didn’t attend. Besides, regardless of what susurrations of protest I may occasionally offer, muttered under my breath, the often frenzied digitality and dissonance of singer-songwriter/pan-instrumentalist Trent Reznor’s malaise-driven Nine Inch Nails is undeniably my favorite musical indulgence.[1]
Though my listening interests are better typified by what I’ll call “neofolk”—the sesquipedalian and baroque chamber pop of The Decemberists; the Beatles-inspired, often completely acoustic sound of Elliott Smith; the strangled Chipmunk vocals and solo harp of Joanna Newsom—I always return to the completely opposite soundscape of Reznor’s customarily one-man project.[2] I return for succor at both peaks and troughs of my depression cycle, when I am elated or deflated, as if the peculiar loops and layers and chromatic piano characteristic of Nails’ alternately bleak and tumultuous records were home. I am hopelessly transfixed. And on that long, lonely midnight drive to Ohio, I wondered why exactly this should be. I’d done the same, wondered, on myriad occasions over the fifteen years of my Reznor obsession, but on this surprisingly balmy canicular night, I came to a sort of conclusion. I stopped my stereo’s playback of the delicate, dulcet, plaintive guitar of “Leaving Hope” to doublecheck the staggering truth I had, in a moment of satori, just realized; I rode in silence awhile, computing the implications. I return to Reznor’s oeuvre as if it was home because, in several significant ways, it is.
- 16th March 1994
The sky was Apple II grey. Thunder coming. I was thirteen years old and wore ebon-rimmed John Lennon glasses so thick that, at the right angle on sunny afternoons, I scorched the drier grass upon which I gazed. In photographs, they did Picassoesque things to my ears, removing sections and refracting them back in unexpected and inappropriate places, like turning the middle plane on some head-shaped, previously sensible Rubik’s Cube. I wore what my mother affectionately called a “hockey haircut,” but what was, in fact, more like an incipient pageboy, a Junior Prince Valiant.[3] My single greatest ambition was to escape notice. If, at this point in my life, I found myself developing a rudimentary superpower along with all that dun-colored overnight mystery hair, I would have wished it be invisibility. But despite an earnest wish to vanish and an aura of general diffidence, I never mastered the art of disappearing completely.
A Wednesday, I had intentionally dodged the school bus to ride in with an exceptionally hip incarnation of my rarely present half-sister. The day before, she’d been to our mall’s Tape World, the birthplace of lambent fluorescence itself, and plucked a new cassette from the pegboard walls. I could smell its presence.[4] I’d ignored its lethargic jazziness most of the way to the middle school;[5] when it segued into a faster, Casio-keyed number which flitted dizzyingly and panned between channels of the surround stereo system, the first verse’s vocals warbled by some agonized hermaphrodite, I noticed it peripherally. Its refrain, however, lassoed me. “God is dead,” a man howled, “and no one cares.”
The singer’s voice crackled with an intensity that registered as sincerity. As opposed to the clichéd euphemism “saved my life,” it might be more ironically apropos to say that Nine Inch Nails, at that moment, redeemed me. I turned my pale, pageboy-framed face and asked, “Did he just say ‘God is dead and no one cares?’” She reeled at the scurrility, my sister, but admitted the fact. This admission happened to coincide rather conveniently with the approach of her scarlet, two-door coupe to a spot parallel with the school’s chipped goldenrod curb. And so I mashed the pad of my thumb against the eject button of her tape deck, jammed the warm cassette into the kangaroo pouch of a mustard hoodie and called, “See you later,” already out of reach.
I rewound the cassette—smooth, crystalline plastic stamped white with the title The Downward Spiral—and began from the beginning: the curious whip-crack prelude to the Dostoyevskian “Mr. Self-Destruct,”[6] the synthetic second percussion track of which sounds like the chain-winding action of a roller coaster, as its cars struggle to climb that first dreadful incline to an empyreal apex, from which, by its very nature, one understands that only descent is possible; beneath my hood, I stole sixty-five minutes of class time to listen through to the end: the unexpected and jarring cacophony of dissonant feedback whine that serves as suffix to the plangent acoustic and piano threnody, “Hurt.”[7] I stared out at my peers from between second-hand headphones—the throng of mean-spirited, acne-spattered imps notable for explosive and unpredictable sadistic cruelty which itself was fueled by what I’d much later recognize as the wellspring of burgeoning insecurity. Reznor sang, “You know how this world can beat you down. And I’m made of clay; I feel I’m the only one who thinks this way.” I couldn’t recall having ever felt so included, validated.
I was thirteen years old and I had no friends. My half-sisters had distant lives of their own. My grandparents died long before I’d been conceived. I’d never met my father, and my mother—in an everlasting battle to pay both medical insurance premiums and the rent on the suitcase-sized townhouse, the perpetually impending eviction from which she always vociferously yowled about—worked too many jobs to effectively care. I had gotten used to the white noise of low-grade malaise which accompanied my feeling of being marooned. And until that morning, the most similarly minded spirit with which I was acquainted was the Michael Jackson who, in 1987, sang “Leave Me Alone.” I flipped The Downward Spiral back to its A-side and sighed, exhaling years. Someone out there, I thought, feels like this. I’m not alone.
I believe my sister got her tape back at some point the following spring, when the section of magnetic strip containing “Eraser,” the slow-burning, accumulatively noisy B-side opener, became thin and stretched—too well-loved to be acoustically viable. But by that point, thanks to a combination of decoration-only security cameras and the dexterity of my thin hands, I’d collected the entire back catalogue in disc format; I’d ditched my glasses in favor of contact lenses and grown my hair long—the way I’d always wanted it; and most importantly, because I’d been bolstered by the discovery and subsequently persistent presence of a kindred mind, I’d long forgotten any desire to disappear.
- 20th September 1999
“La Mer” and I met over an ashtray and an anthill of cocaine. The eleventh track on the first disc of The Fragile—Nine Inch Nails’ first new album in five years—the song was, to even the most fanatic devotee of the band, completely unexpected. Its circular central melody, played on a detuned piano, is hypnotic. Dizzying. Its first ninety seconds, piano only, immediately follow the album’s loudest and most grating ten, a disarming juxtaposition. The song layers a dozen primarily acoustic instruments—piano, xylophone, drums, cello, upright bass and more—over a dissonant hum of e-bow guitar,[8] building to a sonic head that’s almost atonal for its agglomeration of melodies.[9] Reznor does not sing. Instead, the vocals are spoken in Creole French by a woman named Denise Milfort.[10] The song, upon first listen, is so conspicuous when considered in the context of not only the ten that precede it on the album, but the greater body of Nine Inch Nails’ work, that one cannot help but go tense, still, curious, and pay close attention.
I’d been casually enjoying the album, but nineteen and ensconced in my obligatory Doors/Pink Floyd phase, I was reasonably certain I’d outgrown the stark machine noise of Nine Inch Nails. With the arrogant, dismissive attitude only a nineteen-year-old can summon, I figured I was just spinning the disc “for old times’ sake,” nostalgically. During the heavily distorted, crunching guitar coda of “No, You Don’t” (the screeching aforementioned tenth track), I’d given up giving up cigarettes and lit my first in four days. That’s pretty much the precise moment the deafening clamor cut out and gentle, forlorn “La Mer” began. I froze, Camel clenched between my teeth; smoke stung my eyes, which had welled and spilled over, ruining the cocaine below. The Fragile, it turned out, was not only rich, fascinating art which I had certainly not “outgrown,” but perfectly predictive of and sympathetic to my situation. Reznor, it seemed, understood something important which I was just beginning to grasp.
The guiding principle of Nine Inch Nails has always been the creation of music from flawed sounds.[11] Reznor composed The Fragile in the wake of the death of the woman who raised him, with the general intention of making “everything sound a little broken”; the record has a general theme of “things sort of falling apart.”[12] The title track’s verse percussion is the sound of someone kicking a box full of chains. “Somewhat Damaged” layers four acoustic and electric guitars, each playing a different four-note guitar part in ¾ time—all of which are eventually superimposed upon a differently timed percussion and synthesizer arrangement.[13] The song’s preamble and first two verses positively crawl, like something very recently crippled. “The New Flesh” is underscored by the sound of a ticking clock, as plucked out on the head of a guitar.[14] “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally” is dedicated “to Clara,” his late maternal grandmother. In the seemingly silent ten final seconds of “The Day the World Went Away” (similarly themed), if one were to turn to max. the volume knob on pricey speakers, one would hear the phrase “I love you” chanted beneath pick-scraped guitar strings. Both discs—twenty-six songs; eleven unconventionally structured instrumental (or virtually instrumental) selections—are typified by the sound of ruined string instruments (detuned piano, inexpertly played ukulele, slide guitar, &c.) and indeed do sound very much like the soundtrack to systems failing, things falling apart. The individual songs of the record cling tenuously together, yet somehow this tenuousness makes the greater idea more poignant: the awkwardness enhances the art. The record is the creative output of an insular misanthrope whose world has just gotten smaller and more loveless. It’s the musical translation of sorrow: an emotion equal parts frustration, sadness and rage. And “La Mer” is the frangible, beautiful centerpiece.
Sprawled on a dusty hardwood floor, nicotine rushed into my blood as the jazz drums kicked in. Endorphins dribbled from glands as I cried for the first time in five or more years. The melody circled. That first listen, I felt the way I imagine the pious feel at church. “La Mer” is Reznor’s ode to the freedom of hopelessness. “And when the day arrives,” his vocalist purrs, “I’ll become the sky and I’ll become the sea. And the sea will come to kiss me, for I am going home.”[15]
My roommates stole from me while I was away working to pay their rent. My single friend had, in the face of his father’s cancer, abruptly fled our upstate New York home to take up residence in Ft. Lauderdale; he’d become psychotically depressed and phoned me nightly, threatening suicide if I didn’t come to “save” him. My dog had died suddenly from a cancer no one knew he had. And I’d lost my job when I left the cook’s line to console my mother, who’d stumbled gracelessly into my restaurant, bawling, on her way back from some doctor, having just learned that her pain was cancer, metastatic, terminal—the same that had lain waste to both her grandmother and mother. The next afternoon, I returned home from her house—having made a pair of pit stops for nepenthes: smokes and cocaine—to find the corrugated-wrapped Fragile on my doorstep, mysteriously shipped a day ahead of schedule by the then-fledgling Amazon.com. Ready to decompress, I positioned the disc at the player’s maw and allowed my machine to suck it in. For forty-four minutes, I just stared at the chemical coping mechanisms arrayed before me, unsure if indulgence would cause more problems than it solved—the abstinent addict’s clichéd question. And happenstance would have it that I gave up, I lit my smoke, the same second the caustic power chords quit and Reznor’s meditation on the liberation of giving up began.
As the instrumentation climaxes and resolves itself in increasingly simplified denouement, Reznor’s vocalist makes a powerful closing overture, playfully repeating a particular self-destructive refrain—infamous to Nails acolytes from its prevalence on The Downward Spiral, where it became more or less synonymous with suicidal ideation. “Rien ne peut m’arrêter maintenant,” Milfort practically giggles: “Nothing can stop me now.” She repeats the phrase a number of times, lightheartedly. And the frivolity makes sense: “La Mer” defuses, if only temporarily, the sorrow that smolders within it, the indefatigable sorrow which prompts giving up in the first place.
April 2000, I saw the song performed in concert. My first experience of the live band, I’d assumed it was a foregone conclusion that “La Mer” was out of the question—too mellow to sate the spike- and fishnet-adorned horde in the undulating mosh pit. Halfway through the set, Reznor fingered the keys of a piano in the characteristic circular melody while the background LED curtains flashed with images of rain on water; I had to hide my face from the girl who’d accompanied me. I assumed it was her fault I’d cried. That I’d cried because I’d left college to be with this girl who no longer wanted the same, that I’d cried for unrequited love and loneliness. It was eight and a half years before I knew better.
- Early May, 2004
I was the only person with whom I was acquainted who had yet to purchase an iPod. Thoroughly disengaged from the techno-elite, I had sailed a fistful of years into the Twenty-First Century without even knowing what an mp3 file was. And then, one blustery Thursday afternoon, I was, along with eighty other sidewalk-stationed latte sippers, driven into the close quarters of an overcrowded coffee shop when a thunderhead broke without warning directly above our thoroughfare.[16] I saw one, an iPod, up close, and the damp, afroed postpunk who owned it did me the courtesy of explaining all about its characteristic potential for collecting statistical trivia—individual track times and aggregate amount of hours per artist, play and skip counts, &c. O, rapture: the trivia! Hands instantly clammy and tremulant with anticipation, all three-point-whatever pounds of my Type-A brain was gravid with inchoate queries, giddy for the possibilities.[17] I’d say it was nine days before I found some creative budgeting technique[18] that allowed me to obtain one on a bookshop clerk’s measly wage.
I pined for this easy access to trivia because speculation upon irrelevancy is the miscellaneous debris which the bulk of my consciousness comprises—one should never ask me “What are the odds?” unless really in search of an answer. Music-related trivia had haunted me especially, perpetually and intractably.[19] How much of my life had been spent listening to a single favorite song? The album it’s from? Despite intellectualized/habitual claims of favor, what one performer/album/selection did I actually listen to the most? And so on. I tend toward phases of fixation: I’ll listen to an album or artist exclusively (and I mean that literally) over a 120-day period and then, having overexposed myself, I’ll ignore it/them entirely for a quarter-year. Post listening jag, I’ll become insatiably curious about the details of my binge: just how many times did I listen to that disc before I finally swapped it for another? Thus my iGlee upon discovery of the iPod and iTunes—the latter a requisite program for iFunctionality, a sort of port installed on one’s desk- or laptop unit, into which the mere vessel of the iPod can sail and dock for occasional reloading, maintenance and, most germanely, offloading of the ship’s log. All of this iNonsense afforded me the possibility of actual answers to long-pondered, imbecilic questions. Portability and relative compactness of my music collection were certainly sweet ancillary benefits, yes, but Steve Jobs would only have had to tell me that, with his product, my aural dalliances would be affixed with an odometer and I’d’ve been sold. Indeed, this is, more or less, how iTech was successfully pitched to me in that café.
All of this to say that, within months of iOwnership, I learned something curious and was forced by the knowledge to ask a discomfiting question to which, from the data at hand, I extrapolated an answer maybe unsettling. What I learned was this: Statistically speaking, I listen to the chilly flats and sharps, barks and growls, of Nine Inch Nails more than any other two artists. What I asked was this: If the six-year amnesia of the infancy/toddler phase is excluded, have I heard Trent Reznor’s voice more than any other? The answer I extrapolated: I’m pretty sure, yes, I have. In four years, I’ll be thirty-two; I’ll have been away from home for half my lifetime; my mother will have been dead a decade and there will be absolutely no doubt about it. No person in my life, besides the disembodied voice of Reznor, has been consistently present for longer than three years.
- 21st March 2009
The hard drive of my iMac contains 6,600 songs, 343 of which (5.2%) are by Nine Inch Nails.[20] This is, of course, my largest collection of songs by any single artist, only slightly smaller than the next three libraries combined; runners-up in the top ten include Elliott Smith (143), Radiohead (139), Pink Floyd (131), Death Cab for Cutie (105), Bright Eyes (102) and The Decemberists (93). This catalogue comprises all of Reznor’s original work, plus what remixes and live versions[21] I actually enjoy (there are about thirty-five others I don’t enjoy, thus don’t own). The 11.1 hours of studio work—162 of 343 are original album cuts—are the songs with which I spend the bulk of my time.
In the sixty-two days since I purchased the aforementioned iMac, I’ve selected and listened through a Nine Inch Nails song 1,668 times (I am very much “in a phase” at the moment). I’ve listened to 7,470 songs altogether. In those sixty-two days,[22] I’ve listened to the latest album, The Slip, twenty-two times; I’ve picked and played a song from the 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine thirty-nine times, but only thrice listened all the way through. I’ve chosen and listened through a selection from the four-disc instrumental experiment Ghosts: I-IV 193 times. In those two months, “Lights in the Sky” is my most-played selection and I’ve listened to it for a total of 81 minutes. I’ve listened to 74 minutes of “La Mer.” Taken together, more than one complete day out of the last sixty has been spent listening to Reznor’s oeuvre. 92 minutes of “Piggy,” 78 minutes of “The Fragile,” 42 minutes of “Wish.” And so on.
Using the thirty-three minutes of ’92’s Broken as exemplar, I’ll attempt to convey an idea of the scale of my aural adventures with Nine Inch Nails. Extrapolating from the hard data provided by that metaphorical Ship’s Log, iTunes, and using those numbers to then gauge the time spent listening in that medieval decade prior to iOwnership, I can make some pretty solid guesses. I’ve listened to the instrumental opener “Pinion” (1:03) 250 times in fifteen years—a mere sixteen plays per year, on average. I’ve played “Wish” (3:47), 1,000 times: a beefier 66.6 spins yearly, keeping in mind that I probably played the song 300 times between May and December of ’94 alone (lowering the average to 50 plays each of the last fourteen years). “Last” (4:45), 1,000 times; “Help Me, I Am in Hell” (1:56), 300 times; “Happiness in Slavery” (5:21), 700 times; “Gave Up” (4:09), 750 times; the hidden cover of Adam Ant’s “Physical” (5:29), 600 times; and the album’s final selection, “Suck” (5:09), 675 times.
At 1,399,975 seconds of total listening time, this is 389 hours, or a little more than sixteen days of my life. This figure doesn’t take into account that I’ve also spent quite a bit of time with remixes of these songs—found on the ’92 companion disc Fixed—and live versions from a (no longer owned) Woodstock ’94 bootleg, 2000’s live CD/DVD release And All That Could Have Been, an audio rip of the ’07 live Blu-ray Beside You in Time and the “accidentally leaked” HD footage of the 2008 Lights in the Sky Over North America tour.[23] A conservative estimate, I’ve spent 227,000 seconds of my life listening to “Wish” alone. Or sixty-three hours and three minutes. Or a little more than two and one-half sleepless days.
And Broken is only my third favorite album.
- 15th August 2006
I was preparing to spend my twenty-sixth birthday alone by assembling a playlist for an aimless and extended, moonlit drive, windows down. I was hoping for torrential rain. And I was having trouble picking out any song other than the first—to which I’d been looking forward for twelve years.
Around the time of my fourteenth birthday, in 1994, the gnomonic hard-on I’d been sporting for everything Nails had begun to show signs of fading, but certain tracks in the oeuvre had started to take on special significance. Being frequently given over to adolescent fits of hormone-induced rancor, the raucous thirty-three minutes of Broken had become my favorite soundscape—preferably played at a volume that knocked hanging picture frames crooked. Its first vocal selection, “Wish,”[24] had caught my attention and the song remains an anthem of my particular brand of misanthropy. Plus, it pretty much rocks. The guitars[25] enter startlingly; they crash like lightning, jagged but precise, cold, yet lush; they scorch the earth of the song’s more terrestrial lyrics and panicked, ventricular drums.[26] At the first verse’s close, there is a brusque moment of absolute silence, no more than half a second, negative space somehow louder than the sonic chaos which bookends it and, well, much like the anticipation of incipient ejaculation. I would play the song loud as my four-watt boom-box allowed and thrash around shirtless in pleather pants, sweating black hair dye, screaming along until my throat felt like sand-encrusted strips of raw bacon. I loved the song unabashedly, but one small detail niggled at me.
The song’s second verse contains the lyric, “No new tale to tell: twenty-six years on my way to Hell.” And sometimes I felt that it, this statement of age, belied my right to ownership of such vitriolic angst.[27] I was not twenty-six years on my way to anywhere. I was just recently a teenager when I fell for the song. True, I resembled the other lyrical descriptors with nihilistic aplomb: “without a soul,” yes, and instead possessed of “this big fucking hole”; I wanted a tee shirt emblazoned with the line I’d adopted as maxim: “Don’t think you’re having all the fun—you know me, I hate everyone.” But I was not, alas, twenty-six years on my way to Hell. And I am, pop-psychologically speaking, just Type-A enough that this bothered the hell out of me. Eventually, I began to skip the song when spinning the CD.[28]
Five ’til midnight and I took three at a time the steps down from my apartment and to my battered car. I drove without music until I reached the freeway: 12:01. Down the ramp and up to speed, I switched on my stereo, dialed up the volume and began to celebrate. My life had, by midnight of my twenty-sixth birthday, essentially circled back to the familiar and remote place it had been the first time I’d heard the song, twelve years before—a sort of interpersonally blighted intrapersonal tundra. My friends had married each other, planned pregnancies and mortgages and left me to cigarettes and peaty single-malt scotch. The girl with whom I was smitten was a figment, a phantom: time had pitilessly carried on and the flesh and bone woman, somewhere out there, likely bore little resemblance to the one who had, a year past, shed hair on my pillows. If I was in love, it was with a ghost. My mother was long dead, compressed to a brick of crumbly ash. I drove alone to nowhere because I had no one to see.
Steering wheel steadied by my knees, I played air drums with abandon, unconcerned for the moment about maintaining any semblance of a suave veneer. I sang along. “This is the first day of my last days.” My chest clenched; I felt my heartbeat as a sort of cramp. “The last thing I left, I just threw it away.” My palms dampened with the sort of nervous sweat that smells of pennies. I depressed the cruise control button and screamed through the first chorus. I’d been waiting twelve years—a hair shy of half my life—to sing this song with Reznor, to harmonize with him, to agonize with him, and have it be an honest moment. I’d been waiting to sing his song and have it not be a lie; to wail in concert with him as if to say, I understand your pain and desolation. Or maybe because I could at that moment be certain that this man I admired, as he’d lyrically sworn, had experienced and understood mine.
- 22nd August 2008
The ringing of the guitar stopped for a little over a second, and in the sudden quiet, the recorded sound of a lazy wind seemed deafening, all-consuming, final. After the screech of the apocalyptic coda to “Hurt,” the relative silence was relieving and more than a little like how I imagine death. My throat pulsed, abraded by hours of singing, screaming along. It would be gritty for days, popping like an old record. I had just exploded at highest intensity, in accompaniment of Reznor during the regret-heavy final chorus and epilogue of the song. “What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you could have it all—my empire of dirt. I will let you down, I will make you hurt. If I could start again a million miles away, I would keep myself. I would find a way.” I had bellowed those words along with Reznor. So had everybody else in the arena. I’d first sung them when I was thirteen; Reznor had written them when he was twenty-eight, the age I’d reached a week before coming to Cleveland. It was 2008: “Hurt” had been put to tape fourteen years earlier, put to paper a year before that and, unless it was a particularly lousy day on the tour bus, it was doubtful that, at the precise moment he sang them, there in the summertime city, Reznor truly meant them. It being the best night I’d had in twenty months, I didn’t either. But at some point, both of us certainly had.
I’d meant them during episodes of the emotional bends, decompressions of the heart, when I sang them from atop an unmade bed that still smelled like whomever. I’d meant them while driving capriciously, with no destination, while considering how exactly my life had become my life. I had meant them during drug overdoses, when my conscious mind was closing like an iris and the words to someone else’s song were the one thing I was sure I understood, the one familiar thing. I had meant them when I sang them from a stained, borrowed gurney, as immigrant collegians hauled my mother’s corpse out of the house, using the discolored bed linens as a hammock.
It didn’t matter what we were feeling during the moments he sang his songs that night, under scores of sun-bright bulbs. At some point, these lyrics (as well as all the others in the catalogue) had given a shape to the haggard, hideous condition in which we’d each found our soul. What mattered was that we sang them again, together, in celebration of the times we’d each meant them alone: in shitty basements, after the betrayal of a close friend, &c. In one wordless, fast-forwarded blur, I considered this notion during that second of relative silence before the concert’s final song kicked in.
“In This Twilight” opens with rhythmic, crunching bursts of noise that sound not unlike the guttural crunching of dot-matrix printers. This odd sonic field is punctuated by what sounds like a sample of an elevator’s Door Open ding. The overall effect is a feeling of an anxious, mournful perpetual arrival. Live, the bassist plays a heavyhearted mellow groove that dips in and out of the rigid, simple drum line—which itself, the drumming, gives the impression of a futile or immediately revoked forward motion. Like “Hurt,” the song conceals hope in apparent bleakness; “In This Twilight” is just less subtle about it. “Watch the sun,” sings T.R., “as it crawls across a final time. And it feels like it was a friend….Do you wonder if it feels the same?” My ribcage suddenly felt too small; my tears did not begin slowly. And this is when I understood. Earlier in the night, as “1,000,000” galloped ahead; later, during the wrung-sounding guitar riff of “Head Down”; yet later in the set, through the bombastic despair of “Gave Up”; yes, even eight years earlier, during “La Mer”: I cried, but neither for unrequited love, nor because I felt alone. I cried because, at those moments, I did not.
Douglas Coupland, in his novel Microserfs, uses the word “interiority” as a noun describing the experience of either feeling you are inside another’s essence/mind/soul, or that someone else is inside yours. It’s synonymous with “communion,” but without all the unfortunate Christian connotations. I’d experienced on a grand scale an interiority I hadn’t believed possible, that cloudy March middle school morning. I’d experienced an unheralded, poignant version of it that first time I spun The Fragile. I’d waited half a lifetime to experience it with “Wish.” I experienced microbursts of interiority all the tens of thousands of times in fourteen years when I had dropped a needle on vinyl, closed the plastic hatch of a cassette deck, or even thumbed and tapped the click wheel on an iPod, summoning Trent Reznor’s doleful baritone. But in concert, the feeling is almost eviscerating in its magnitude. As I sang, screamed along with the artist onstage, I felt the way I imagine many people do when a silver-haired mother or father holds open the white screened door with a straight right arm and ushers his or her grown child back inside, home, with the left. In a 2005 song entitled “Home,” Reznor, as usual, says it for me: “I return to the only place I’ve ever felt that I belonged.” But this interiority, this homecoming, wasn’t all I realized.
The live version of “In This Twilight” is one of the few selections in the Nine Inch Nails catalogue which is much longer than its studio counterpart. “Twilight” is two minutes and five seconds (56%) longer on stage, in order to provide denouement for the evening’s ferocity; those two minutes find the band, one by one, quitting their instruments and breaking the fourth wall by waving goodbye to the audience.[29] Eventually, the only player that remains is Reznor, in the center of a pale yellow cone of light, in front of an LED display of an industrialized city aflame, fingering a piano in an improvisation[30] around the lugubrious melody of a song he never actually plays live. Reznor plays with his eyes closed, with a grimace, and it never feels fraudulent, phoned in. And for about thirty seconds, there is a palpable intimacy between the solo artist and his audience. The onlookers see a man in the process of turning himself inside out. It was during these thirty seconds that I realized the night’s performance fulfilled the same essential function for both of us, for artist and audience.
Reznor, lonely and morose, composes music as art, yes, but also as cathartic release, as a way to incarnate and exorcise troublesome emotions. Most theorists and philosophers, from Aristotle on, agree that all art is inherently cathartic for both artist and audience. But art is not simply purgative, it also expresses a basal yearning: every artist is creator of a communiqué, hoping to be heard, understood, validated. Art is a communal gesture. It’s an overture from the insular to the insular, in hope of a meeting of minds, in hope of at least one moment of communion, interiority. It is in love and art that human beings are least alone.
Trent Reznor, the artist, in a sweat-darkened red silk button-down, hunched over his keyboard and tapped out a somber mostly improvised melody he was clearly not “phoning in”—something of which many pop musicians are found guilty during live shows. For almost twenty years, this lonely misanthrope has released records in which he tacitly asks to be heard, understood, validated. For half of my life, I’ve heard and understood him because it seems he already understands and validates me. Kurt Vonnegut once suggested that “people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things that you care about…You are not alone.’” Conveying this message is the function of art. Like all human beings, artist and audience are inherently alone. But together, they achieve something that, unassisted, neither could. Trent Reznor: on stage and turning himself inside out, or screaming on CD; myself: listening quietly in the dark, or singing along from 300 feet away. We are both necessary elements in the artistic equation. Artist and audience: we give each other a reason to exist.
[1] I’ve disappointingly found myself, on occasion, defensively qualifying or downplaying my interest in the face of judgmental hipsters—the mesh-hatted folk in checkerboard deck shoes who feel that buying off-brand is the most subversive of all acts. But the facts remain: the seminal 1991 Lollapalooza extravaganza—which redefined “alternative” music—was what it was because of Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails; the music comprises the syllabi of university-level courses on, say, neoclassicism in pop music or “The Dystopic Psyche,” and it’s been the subject of numerous peer-reviewed scholarly articles, a memorable one entwining The Downward Spiral with hifalutin belles letters such as Zarathustra and Sartre’s Nausea. Regardless of whether it suits a particular aural palate, Reznor’s nine proper albums are intensely cathected music, richly textured for their Goldbergian sonic layering. Reznor creates mature art which one might not care for, but which nevertheless merits study. That it’s taught at the university level does not explain why it’s my favorite music, but it does, to some degree, justify my assertion that my aural palate is not necessarily less sophisticated for the predilection.[BACK]
[2] The 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine declares in its liner notes “Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor.” Despite the fifteen musicians which have at some point comprised his live band and the occasional guest he’s had perform on an album, this initial avowal is really the end of any discussion.[BACK]
[3] In retrospect, my hairdresser must have had it out for me. I went monthly to the same guy and my only instruction was, “Please, make me look cool.” Aided by a speedy search engine, research into the trendy coiffures of 1992-94 reveals that the only then-admired pageboy sprouted from the skull of Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. Perhaps my mother tipped lousily.[BACK]
[4] I mean this literally; one of the many things I miss in the age of digital, completely intangible and downloadable music is the inky, slightly nauseous smell of a heavy, delicate new album. Cassettes, I think, were the most pungent phylum of fetor.[BACK]
[5] The ride started with “Piggy” and we didn’t have far to go. But I must digress: I cannot in good conscience compose this essay without mentioning the song’s drumkit coda—Reznor’s single recorded session of live drumming, purportedly just a test of mic setups and used as placeholder, blocking off space for a solo similar, but “less shitty,” if I recall his wording. When he stumbled upon this take much later, he liked it too much to not use it. And for good reason: it’s the best drum solo I’ve ever heard.[BACK]
Making heavy use of perfunctory crash cymbal and snare, the slippery slope of the solo is the only deviation from the song’s constant tambourine, sparse metronomic verse drumming and just barely more complex beats/hi-hat of the chorus. The song, before its outro, is essentially a Spartan jazz lullaby. But the closing drums are frenetic, haphazard. They reveal themselves slowly—with a single violent punch of a tightly tuned snare in the final beat of one measure; then at the close of the next, three similar blows sound like the surprising early kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn; finally, Reznor’s sticks play tense off-time and unconventional staccato jumbles, perforated only by full-strength abuse of the crash cymbal. Considered in toto, the solo sounds like pushing a body packed into a tin trash can down a flight of poorly carpeted steps. Emotionally, it resembles the instant when one has realized that everything planned for will not come to pass: miscarriage, divorce, expulsion, termination, arrest, &c. Just prior, Reznor moans, “What am I supposed to do? I’ve lost my shit because of you.” The solo is the percussive sound of collapse, plain and simple. And I’ve never heard a soul come close to accurately reproducing it.
[6] The prelude really is a whip-crack. It’s a sample from George Lucas’ 1971 sci-fi art flick THX-1138 of a casual sadist watching film of a flogging. In the context of the concept album, this sets the tone; it’s also an ironic gesture which breaks the fourth wall: by continuing to listen, the listener becomes the sadist, enjoying the degradation and thrashing of the narrator, proxy for Reznor himself. It’s an instant and unsettling reversal; it foreshadows the bloodthirstiness of the “pigs” referenced three songs in, during the rabid 269-bpm “March of the Pigs”—a song Reznor has confessed is about the merciless intrusiveness which sometimes becomes the artist’s burden; a song in which a destructively curious, sadistically greedy phalanx (Fans? Critics? Friends?) says, “I want a little bit, I want a piece of it; I think he’s losing it. I want to watch it come down.” It’s metaphorically significant that a mob of swine can devour a man of average stature, bone and all, in minutes. It’s also probably worth mentioning that the album was recorded in the unknowingly rented Sharon Tate house: the place Charles Manson’s “family” had intended to eviscerate an artist, Roman Polanski, but settled for his wife and unborn child, leaving the word “PIG” written on the wall in the dead woman’s blood.[BACK]
[7] Which was, of course, later covered by an ailing Johnny Cash one year from the grave. Though I’m obviously beholden to Reznor’s version, Cash’s is affecting. Mark Romanek—director of Nails’ video for “Closer,” regarded as elite work in the medium and a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection—filmed a video for Cash’s version of the track which is absolutely harrowing.[BACK]
[8] A device which allows one to play the guitar without fingers or pick, the e-bow creates an electromagnetic field through which the strings are manipulated. As the name suggests, the sound is reminiscent of guitar played with a bow.[BACK]
[9] It’s been said that, in this way, Reznor’s “La Mer” resembles both French impressionist composer Debussy’s 1905 orchestration of the same name and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.[BACK]
[10] An actress by trade, but without any actual stage credits to her name until 2006. The Creole element seems less pretentious and arbitrary, I suppose, if one knows that for ten years Reznor’s studio was a converted funeral home in New Orleans.[BACK]
[11] Which I’m virtually positive Reznor said verbatim. But after hours of research, the only person I can find so-quoted is myself, on a fan-site, years back. The closest approximation by T.R. is as follows, said of The Fragile: “I wanted this album to sound like there was something inherently flawed in the situation, like someone struggling to put the pieces together.” (21 August 1999)[BACK]
[13] A personal favorite moment comes at 3:21 in the song: in an off-beat, Reznor interpolates into the three already-running cymbal tracks a metallic clanging which sounds like a monkeywrench falling on concrete. A rather unmusical half of a second of sound, it is surprisingly discomfiting and makes a purposely and purposefully awkward, lurching song exponentially more so—even if one isn’t consciously aware of it, which I wasn’t for six or seven years (I only knew the song “got weirder there”).[BACK]
[14] It also includes the lyric “this is not an exit,” a reference to both B.E. Ellis’ American Psycho and Downward Spiral: one of the many ways in which The Fragile undoes the dehumanization and heart-hardening of its predecessor. Spiral’s opener, speaking in the voice of one’s lurking drive for self-immolation, includes the phrase “I am an exit.” Other examples of this intertextual contradiction include a pair of direct references to Spiral’s “The Becoming” (about becoming inhuman, machine-like: “The me that you know is now made up of wires”): one in the album’s first verse—“This machine is obsolete”—and another again in “The New Flesh,” a queerly structured song closed by a sequence of distorted screams of the word “unbecoming.”[BACK]
[15] In French, of course. A bizarre alternate and more literal translation of Milfort’s Creole dialect reads: “And the day has arrived to thresh the sky and to thresh the sea. And the sea has embraced me. And it has dispensed me from my cage.”[BACK]
[16] In a singular, sadly ephemeral moment, the throng that day in the café—air close, a surfeit of silent, dripping hipsters anxiously glaring out tinted windows in the standing-room-only space—suddenly burst into doleful song, en masse. The bistro’s disc system was spinning Weezer’s “The Good Life” and there was this unmistakably communal recognition that a) it’s as fun as rock music ever got, and b) not one of us had heard or thought of it in more than five years. At the chorus—“I don’t wanna be an old man anymore/ It’s been a year or two since I’ve been out on the floor/ Shakin’ booty, makin’ sweet love all the night/ It’s time I got back to the Good Life”—everyone crooned in unison, enthusiastically, and I think most of us tingled with a slightly discomfiting sense of camaraderie that pseudo-aloof hipsters are usually too ironically detached to allow. The song ended a minute later; we lapsed into almost postcoital awkwardness; the cool bullets of rain soon passed; we were every one of us alone again.[BACK]
[17] Such as a largely intangible music collection. The CD and I had had a checkered past and it was, perhaps, best that we called it quits before one of us got seriously hurt. Allow me to elaborate. I have certain minimalistic tendencies. In short, I am the mustachioed doppelganger of those Cosby-sweatered folk frequently the subject of exploitative tele-tabloids, the ones who save everything from gumfoil to flyblown KFC buckets; I’m the anti-hoarder, compulsively discarding whatever I can find a way to exist without. I’d discarded the bulky liner pamphlets and cracked jewel cases for my albums—opting instead for a cushioned, zip-up folder-style collection which soon also dissatisfied. So I purchased every disc in my library a second time; within two years, I discarded them again; a year later, I re-purchased them. When I discarded the pesky packaging a third time and almost immediately started to feel the itch to replace them (this would have been the fourth time I’d pay for a copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack), I knew something had to change. Mercifully, that’s when I discovered the semi-tangible mp3 and its ability to occupy about 0.0 ft² of floor space.[BACK]
[18] Less euphemistically, I hocked some shit. A lot of shit. In ’04, even the clunky, b&w 40GB iPod was $500. Trying to raise the loot is when I discovered that one can still sell sperm in my town (though there are extensive interviews and tests), but not blood.[BACK]
[19] Feeling the first effects of black gelatinized LSD, a compatriot announced that he would goddamned sure kill himself unless he found a way to get a goddamned complete transcript of his entire goddamned life. He made this declaration outside the 7-11 where we’d gone for OJ immediately after watching Nightline (its signature insistence: “send $5 for a complete transcript of tonight’s show”) and it stopped me in my tracks—for I’d been a good friend, and also eaten the acid. The compatriot elaborated: “I don’t want no context—I just wanna know what I said and when I said it. Like half a phone call, all ’bout me.” Ignoring the conspicuous narcissism of this desire, I asked, “How many times you think you’ve sung ‘Freebird’? I bet that’d get annoying to read.” He scoffed with a screwed rictus, then spit at his feet. “Dude¡” (The interjection was no doubt punctuated by an un-xclamation: a syntactical mark reserved for derision and condescension of exceptional magnitude.) “I wouldn’t read the fuckin’ thing.” Which begs a question I didn’t and don’t really have the wherewithal to ask. Maybe he had a couch with a short leg or a piano that needed leveling? Maybe he would just shred the report for the construction of a sort of Renfieldian nest that would blend right in with the white walls of an asylum. Regardless, I spent the rest of the tripping hours wondering how many times I’d sung Reznor’s most recognizable phrase, “I want to fuck you like an animal.”[BACK]
[20] For organizational purposes, I have included the following: “Black Bomb,” written by T.R. and Josh Wink, featuring seven minutes of Reznor’s vocals, but sold under the name “Wink”; “Driver Down” (the only song technically credited to “Trent Reznor” and not Nine Inch Nails); a one-off cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut” by T.R. and Ministry’s Al Jourgenson; and both “At the Heart of It All” and “The Beauty of Being Numb,” which, despite being released on a NIN CD are admittedly “created by” Aphex Twin.[BACK]
[21] There are 115 live versions in my collection. One of these 115 has no studio counterpart (“Now I’m Nothing”). Only twenty-four are “bootlegged”—recordings released without Nine Inch Nails’ sanction; the other 91 have been proffered to the public by Reznor himself.[BACK]
[22] Upon transferring my library from PC to Mac, I lost five years of play counts. The last sixty-two days are hard numbers. Any other statistical data is based on honest estimation and an almost absurd familiarity with those nonce obliterated play counts.[BACK]
[23] This last is exemplary of Reznor’s incredibly, surprisingly generous attitude toward his diverse, but often ungrateful and notoriously discontented fanbase. For years, Reznor has freely provided the master tracks or “stems” to his songs so fans can create their own remixes (Radiohead later sold theirs and, in the fine print, claims ownership of any resultant mix). Within five months of becoming free from any record label, he released the experimental Ghosts: I-IV online, with no promotion and under a Creative Commons copyright (which allows all good-faith use of the music); he gave a sample disc of it away on the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay as “officially licensed stolen music.” Two hours of music for $10, it made Reznor a cool million in about a week, but never would’ve seen the light of day had a label been intermediary. Three months later, he released a more traditional album, The Slip, again with no promotion and for free—completely. On 05/05/08, a weblink to various high-quality downloads appeared with the brief explanatory note, “Thanks for the years of loyal support. This one’s on me.” After the ’08 tour, Reznor announced that plans for a screen-legend James Cameron-produced 3D hi-def Blu-ray release of the show had been scrapped, because his former label, which holds some of the rights and stood to profit, wouldn’t cooperate. Soon after, due to “a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives,” 405 gigabytes (more than two times what the average PC holds) of raw hi-def footage of the tour was “somehow” leaked onto file-sharing sites. Besides Reznor, I’ve never heard of an artist who does this sort of thing for his or her fanbase.[BACK]
[24] “Wish,” which contains the lyric, “Gotta listen to your big-time, hard-line, bad luck fist fuck,” somehow ended up considered for and winning the ’92 Academy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Reznor, well-aware of the sham that such institutional awards are, later claimed that he wanted his tombstone to read, “SAID ‘FIST FUCK,’ WON A GRAMMY.”[BACK]
[25] In the studio version of the track, the main guitar line is one riff, simultaneously played by a half-dozen or more guitars. This is a typical embellishment of Reznor’s. “Complication,” from The Fragile, has no less than five different guitar lines staggered atop one another, like bricks in a wall of noise; “The Day the World Went Away,” from the same album, allegedly has forty.[BACK]
[26] The structure of Nine Inch Nails’ compositions perhaps owes more to classical music or hip hop. Reznor generally creates, then samples and loops relatively short riffs/melodies/beats; he then layers five to fifty of these sequences atop one another, lending his songs increasingly complex atmospheres beneath their essentially pop structures. Case in point, the unpretentious ABCBDB of “Wish” is layered atop a howling wind, sampled and looped throughout the entire track. The resemblance I cite between the song’s guitar tracks and storm conditions is not entirely uncalled for or accidental.[BACK]
[27] The thought process was, in retrospect, surprisingly self-aware for a teenager. It went like this: “Dude, you live with your mom. You don’t have to work and nobody’s beaten you up lately. You’ve bootlegged cable TV and piped it into your bedroom—where you’ve got a mini-fridge full of root beer and ice cream sandwiches. What the hell are you so upset about?”[BACK]
[28] Luckily, it’s succeeded by the far superior “Last,” a song with the volume and vehemence of a Gulf Coast warning siren, yet again featuring an unremitting phalanx of guitars. The vocals are so intense and abrasive that it took Reznor fifteen years to figure out how to perform it live and, on the ten or so occasions he actually has, he’s still had to sing it in a lower key. The song hurtles forward for almost five minutes and ends abruptly, as if impact has occurred.[BACK]
[29] Which closing is atypical for Nine Inch Nails. For more than a decade, the show generally ended when all of the equipment had been destroyed—keyboards pulverized; guitars turned to limp, splintered sunflowers; drums punctured messily with mic stands, like home-pierced ears. When that mayhem didn’t happen, Reznor usually mumbled a terse “thank you” and then the band would practically sprint offstage, the final notes of the last song still echoing in the theater.[BACK]
[30] Another oddity. Improvisation has always by necessity been virtually nonexistent at Nine Inch Nails shows (having nothing to do with musicianship, ad-lib is almost always out of the question at Pink Floyd shows, too). What little deviative freedom there was, was in the early days of the band when an angry, greenhorn Reznor told a new guitarist “that it didn’t matter how he played ‘Terrible Lie,’ so long as it got across the message ‘Fuck You’” (Rolling Stone, 21/08/08).[BACK]
