June 23, 2020
Nine Inch Nails: An Exploration of Subterranean Soil on an Unfinished Factory Floor
Early Nine Inch Nails is, as well-versed fans know, an exploration of subterranean soil on an unfinished factory floor. It just so happens that I find that enjoyable, so this will go down as one of the more entertaining picks so far in this project. I’ve just finished recording my top five NIN tracks into our spreadsheet, but as I’m continuing to listen to my elimination block, I know that some shuffling and pulling from my list of honorable mentions is likely to occur. Let me say it again – this dive into the Nine Inch Nails discography has been an extremely fun case study.
Listening to NIN is like lying face down under a running circular saw and rubbing your face in the dirt and metal shavings. The metallic crunching, whining, and grinding that comes at the hand of Trent Reznor has the tendency to place you in an industrial factory seemingly made to brutalize and even disembowel – ahem… see the video for “Happiness in Slavery”, or actually, don’t – but the self-loathing and pain in his words is always able to bring you back to earth.
As much as Reznor is able to push feelings of emotionless automation via instrumentals, vocals, and lyrics, his final product somehow never feels dehumanized. His cold mechanization, from the sound effects – how does he produce those? – to the percussive beatings, to the synths pulled from the bottom of a trench, he never reaches the point where we feel like the artist is a machine itself. “Reptile,” from 1994’s industrial rock pioneer The Downward Spiral, operates at the beat of a nightmarish conveyor belt leading to a car crusher (remember “The Brave Little Toaster”?), but his lyrics (“The best thing about life is knowing you put it together,” the lone words spoken in “A Warm Place”) are capable of reminding us that he does have a pulse, and the feelings he’s expressing are real and relatable. “Hurt” is the obvious sonic anomaly in the entire discography, and it is a welcome finale to Spiral— stripped of sonic dirt, relative to the rest of the album, but not lacking in raw, unfiltered despair.
“‘Reptile’ … operates at the beat of a nightmarish conveyor belt leading to a car crusher … ”
The Downward Spiral is THE album of Nine Inch Nails, as if anyone is really debating it. Well, I know someone who might. John was the newest listener on this pick, his prior experience being that of radio hits, and he expressed the lack of an impression the album made on him personally during the last week of listening. Or, maybe it was that it didn’t live up to expectations resulting from its notoriety, or its effect on the musical landscape. I’m speculating, but I completely understand. It can be an extremely difficult album to take in. There are certainly other albums in the discography that are less grating, less abusive, and more polished.
But the best of Nine Inch Nails is that which never approaches refinement. Reznor was an addict. He did the hard shit – coke and heroin. First-hand, real face-in-the-dirt shit. We’re thankful he eventually escaped addiction, but those struggles helped create the raw sound that makes the absolute best Nine Inch Nails material. Pretty Hate Machine (1989) had some excellent tracks and accomplished the origination of what would come later. However, it needed more bass and, as a result, didn’t fill the ear’s spectrum. The vocals were at times far too forward in the mix, and the lyrics… well, see “Ringfinger.” Come on! This band belongs in the nineties as much as the most quintessential of nineties bands, because of both the sound NIN helped pioneer and that of non-industrial peers of the time. Thus, high quality recording production and ear-deafening bass are absolutely required. In for a penny, in for a pound, and Spiral is proof of that. Even better, actually, is the remastered version of The Downward Spiral released 10 years later.
As always at Musical Chairs, we each listened to the NIN discography chronologically. The band didn’t resonate with John until The Fragile. Okay, I’ll slot it as second best. Fragile had more heart, was less removed of emotion, and was more polished. All good things, except for the aforementioned point that the best NIN is the rawest shit.
As far as the experience with NIN from the other Musical Chairmen, Tonya verges on a hardcore level of fandom. She did make this pick, after all. She grew up with this band, listening from her impressionable, young teenage years to the real-life struggles of her twenties. She likely experienced the themes of early NIN personally, and as a result, she played a critical role in my appreciation of the band.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I listened to Nine Inch Nails with Tonya at a very young age, though I obviously didn’t understand it. Some of my earliest musical memories involve this band, and they likely play a huge part in why I love grunge and distortion-riddled music that was prevalent for the next decade. However, I never felt I could relate on a personal level to most of the band’s lyrics early on.
With Teeth made me question where the Nine Inch Nails I knew from childhood had gone. The cold and grinding sonics were replaced with radio-friendly and, at times, simplistic song structures and melodies. However, Year Zero pulled me back in – or more fittingly, down – and helped me rediscover and re-appreciate NIN, with its uncanny ability to merge the previous grates and grinds with modern synths and production. The fuck-the-system messages I liked in my youth didn’t hurt, either.
Nine Inch Nails have a massive and diverse catalog, and not unexpectedly, the sound Reznor extracted from a circular saw early in his career has eroded to become the sonic nub that is his most recent material. Solid additions to the dark ambient genre, they are. But oh, how enjoyable it is to face-plant into the shavings, and the dirt, and the nostalgia.
And during the writing of this, “Reptile” crawled its way into my top five, to the detriment of my face. – BH