![]() ![]() It’s almost a cliche, at this point, for people to claim that Johnny Cash’s death-haunted cover of the song, is the superior rendition, and certainly Cash brought a gravity to it that Reznor could never hope to approach. Meanwhile, “Hurt,” probably the album’s most enduring non-“Closer” song, builds to that masterful metal-smashing-into-metal churn by the end. “March Of The Pigs” is the album’s loudest and fastest and maybe ugliest song, but it still has those piano breaks, those moments of beautiful calm before the maelstrom gets going again. That idea of balance, of warring ideas finding some kind of harmony, was key to The Downward Spiral. And then there’s Reznor’s voice, which even still today sounds like a teenager’s impotent tantruming and which brought the whole ungainly thing close to home we could hear ourselves in that voice. But there’s still beauty in the song - the crystalline piano that comes in during one of the quieter breaks, for instance. Its lyrics, with Reznor moaning kinda-misogynist nonsense about a beautiful liar and a precious whore, essentially apply the Black Sabbath “War Pigs” school of theatrical bullshit to an idea about heartbreak. It’s an experiment in clanking, blundering industrial overload, but it’s also a fiery, beautifully structured arena-metal song. Take, for example, “Reptile,” with its titanic brontosaurus riff and its gibbering-cricket background noises and its rhythmic robotic whirs. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it. If you’ve seen Dillinger Escape Plan cover it live, you know what it does to a roomful of math-metal maniacs.) And so on The Downward Spiral, Reznor had to pull all these divergent tendencies - toward clattering industrial chaos, toward grand synthpop pathos, toward cocksure larger-than-life kinda-metal stardom - and fashion them into something resembling a coherent whole. (“Wish,” as I see it, was basically a metal-songwriting experiment, and hoo boy was it ever successful. But when Lollapalooza crowds treated Nine Inch Nails like a rock band, they had to learn how to become one, and they did it quite effectively on the Broken EP. Pretty Hate Machine will probably always by my favorite NIN album, since it’s the one that most fullly inhabits its sound and its lonely-kid frustrations. And I’d argue that it holds up better than just about any big album of its era. The Downward Spiral was the reason it was cool, for a minute there, for teenagers to wear ripped-up fishnets on their arms, and it was the reason we went through a temporary period of blatant Reznor imitators finding radio footholds - Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward, Filter (the latter led by an actual former NIN sideman). The Downward Spiral is a fully considered, far-reaching, moment-embodying statement, a self-conscious grab for the brass ring, something that absolutely reshaped the world for millions of high school kids. And so Trent Reznor’s transition into what he became on The Downward Spiral is absolutely remarkable. Ambition - grand, stadium-sized ambition - was not a cool thing for a rock band to aspire to in those days Billy Corgan was the lone arena-dreamer on the scene. Even the Beastie Boys - who came from rap, where world-conquering ambition was a prerequisite for stardom - had folded back in on themselves and created their own pocket universe by the time they made Check Your Head. Stone Temple Pilots always came off like crass careerists, not artists to be taken seriously, and there was almost an apology in the way they carried themselves. It was too much for Kurt Cobain’s ravaged mind and body to handle, and Pearl Jam’s prolonged battle against Ticketmaster, while admirable, was also something of a spotlight-retreat, and probably an intentional one. As Eric Weisbard writes in 1995’s great SPIN Alternative Record Guide, industrial frontmen tended to play “carnival barker” rather than letting the audience in - Ministry’s Al Jourgenson being the great example - and Reznor almost seemed embarrassed, at first, to use the singular first-person pronoun in his lyrics.īut then, the transition to rock stardom was rough on that entire early-’90s crew. Moreover, Reznor came from industrial, a genre that was allergic to rock stardom, a sado-masochistic pummel with a very specific and frightening underground fanbase. ![]() Especially early on, he learned more musically from the Human League and Gary Numan than from, say, Zeppelin, and it took “Head Like A Hole” to trick consumers into thinking Pretty Hate Machine, his debut, was some kind of metal album, rather than a synthpop one. Reznor was a keyboard nerd from Ohio with milk-paste Midwestern skin and an undying fascination with video games. For all his charisma and sinew and theatrical flair, Trent Reznor was a deeply unlikely rock star - more unlikely, even, than his mixed-up gaggle of early-’90s peers. ![]()
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