Trent Reznor really has one of the greatest “maturation” processes of a musical artist that I can think of. His more recent work on The Social Network and The Vietnam War is such a refined, minimalistic version of the specific sound he started forming 20+ years earlier. Not all artists manage to mature in such an elegant way; many never end up quite matching their earlier works, or head into entirely different directions.
Also, a fun random fact: Reznor’s uncle, I believe, ran a heating or HVAC company in the Pittsburgh area. You can still find the occasional industrial device with the REZNOR name on the side.
These are very common in Canada still and anytime I see one I point at it and make the same joke “Looks it’s Vent Reznor” and my girlfriend has never once laughed. Oh well.
I mean, compare "Spam" the Monte Python sketch against "Four Candles" (the Two Ronnies). Four Candles is hilarious the first time you hear it, but Spam only really works on repetition which is why the sketch iterates internally so it's repeated within itself.
On the other hand while "Mastermind" (also the Two Ronnies) is hilarious if you understand the cultural context, you can get "Spam" with no context whatsoever, it's funny because they keep saying "spam".
All to say - maybe the repetition works eventually? Ask again after a decade of marriage :D
It only takes me 3-4 somber notes from a song in a movie or TV show these days to quickly identify it as NIN or Trent\Atticus. The latest was in the season 3 finale of Invincible...
Great post. I've been a fan of NIN for over 30 years and no other band has had such a profound impact on my life. This is saying a lot because I've always been heavily into almost all genres. My biased opinion is that there's something for everyone somewhere in their discography because the music produced has varied quite a bit over the years. If you listen to them and like what you hear, they just announced a new tour.
"It instilled a belief in me that I still have to this day: that any spiritual ailment can be cured by playing music at maximum volume in a small, dark room."
This is so true to me but I never thought of putting it to words like that. I love music and darkness so much that during some especially intense moments in live shows I've been to I close my eyes instead of looking at the band.
I've been to only a few concerts, relatively, 2 raves, maybe 6 concerts, and a few dozen clubs. only the "raves" were loud enough to "cease visual processing" as my sibling said. We saw Ron D Core and Omar Santana spin at a Chinese restaurant that had a dance floor in Los Angeles, and it was so loud (not distorted, just pure air movement and wattage) that the needles were jumping. with quarters on them. Omar Santana's "metal gabber" was transcendental.
I agree! The best concerts I've been to were the ones where I was so engaged in the music that I felt compelled to close my eyes for most of the experience.
> Head Like I/O was the track that got this entire album started. I was at Ohayocon 2011 and joking around with Dave, Dirk, and Carlson about chiptune covers, and the topic of Nine Inch Nails came up. Being a fan, I mentioned that lots of NIN songs would lend themselves to chiptunes rather well, and I decided I would try to surprise everyone with a little bit of Head Like a Hole. In a bout of productivity, I was able to do a rough edit of about two minutes of the song in a day, and the surprise was a big success. The guys all pushed me to consider doing a Nine Inch Nails EP or album.
> I did this track on the Commodore 64 because I got into a conversation with Carlson about it first, and I hadn't given the C64 enough love. The idea to use more systems for the album formed as the idea for the album itself took shape.
The first track didn't sell it, but i started on "Downloadin' it" and from there it's all good, I especially liked "Something You Didn't Ever Have"
Pretty Hate Machine was the first real album i bought with my own money, right around when CD boomboxes became affordable, 1994 or so. And that's probably why the track above hit different for me. My mom hated that song.
I'm always a little confused by people such as this one who loved Downward Spiral so much. It was a slide into confusion started in Broken, away from the honesty and struggle embodied in Pretty Hate Machine. It was the Pinnacle of the band's bowing to the commercial market and fall into anger which it didn't recover, IMO, from until reaching a more mature pinnacle (at least in regard to what I wanted from it and what drew me to it) on With Teeth. Right Where It Belongs is one of my all-time favorite songs wherein they both challenge the exterior and interior to greater truth, greater honesty.
I always saw TDS as a concept album in the vein of his later, more recent soundtracks. It feels more coherently atmospheric in ways earlier albums didn’t, to me.
With Teeth is actually where I think he went too far into “regular rock music” territory, with the result that it sounds generic and flat to me.
I can't deny the first section described that. My confusion isn't about what the claims are or what surface knowledge presents.
As a peer comment noted, an outlet for anger is part of it, a starting point, and was useful to me too. My comment is about how that album more than others invited me to stay stuck there, remain clad and "protected" from my vulnerability. Tearing down, destroying, and randomizing are always easier than solving, creating, healing, loving, and seeing things just/right. More relevant in this context, startups are hard. Being useful is work.
The beauty in the brashness of NIN is what I believe starts with feeling less alone in your heart and leads to loving yourself and spreading that into your ambient surrounds.
As you note, I am sharing what this art is to me. I cannot say that must or should be what it is to any other person. I still hope that we can be less ashamed and equally vigorous with our caring.
Silent Shout is a fantastic album, but "Heartbeats" is the GOAT.
I feel a bit sad that The Knife evolved into a strange place in their later work that I don't really understand. I guess my tastes are a little too basic to follow along.
Eh, to me the lyrics are what make NIN hard to deal with as a grown adult. Meanwhile Ruiner (Version) remains the best song they ever did.
Charlie Clouser's production was unparalleled at the time in the rock/industrial arena. So clean, so meticulous, it was life-changing. Over in the electronic space there were a few psytrance artists doing similar stuff, but I feel like that style of production only bubbled up into mainstream pop in the 2000s (think Britney Spears - Piece of Me). Nowadays most everything sounds just as pristine, but that just goes to show how well a track like Ruiner holds up. The opening 2 minutes still send a shiver down my spine - they're perfection!
I think that's why the TDS/FDTS era of NIN is remembered so fondly - because it's the brief period where some of their stuff sounded ahead of its time.
And thanks and sharing. As I got into what I wrote and decided I wanted to express, I got pretty far from responding to what you wrote. Sorry for that and still, thank you.
The sonic cleanliness of NIN is absolutely one of the things that I love and I agree that PHM was raw compared to a far more refined TDS and what follows. The intentional arrangement or emphasis of sounds so that you do or don't have to deconflict and separate them increases the emotional and psychological fabric of the music immensely.
This makes me think of a past friend who kind of blew my mind by reporting and then insisting (when I struggled to believe) that he didn't really listen to the words in music and sometimes didn't even hear them. I totally appreciate that many people experience music almost exclusively as a tonal experience and it's fascinating to me. Music can be great on that level. I can't separate it and appreciate a song that has more thoroughly attended to more of my dimensions. Songs that satisfy that cleanliness only tonally seem incomplete and far less satisfying down to jarring. Examples of that end of the spectrum include happy songs about domestic violence that don't also punch with irony, where it's like they haven't figured out what an abusive existence they describe. I get the importance of sending telegrams from experiences we have had but too often it feels like they're going to be heard in ways that subconsciously replicate ala meme theory (at least what I know of the academic form).
For me, music is an assemblage of the aural, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and surely more as a form of compressed communication. My favorite songs sound incredible while arranging every piece you reasonably need to assemble some pinnacle thought or understanding. A very grand-in-scope example is Pink Floyd's (actually written by Polly Samson) High Hopes which discusses social and economic dynamics. I heard it later in life and it is of a much different sound but satisfies the same passionate desire in me. Another includes Bjork's Mutual Core discussing the challenges of navigating the paradoxes of individual agency within romantic unions under differences of being and definition. These and those like them each seem like someone who has done the work to drill into multi-dimensional clarity and done the work to share it in a way that reinforces and works to elevate humanity.
Sorry to carry on so but thank you for stimulating this one.
No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I bought hundreds, and even still today I continue to buy digital music, "crate digging" on Bandcamp for hours. But I don't really listen to the words, I find they often interfere with what the raw emotion of the music would have been without them.
I mentioned psytrance, and that's an example of a genre that is largely instrumental, but when they do include a vocal sample, it's invariably some kind of vapid nonsense about taking drugs, and to me - unless the song is deliberately silly - that often undermines the impact of what the music was saying on its own.
I don't buy the idea that vocals are necessary for communication, because otherwise nobody would ever listen to lyrical music in a language they don't understand, except people do and it's very popular. I often prefer to listen to music in a language I don't understand, if anyway I am forced to listen to vocal music, since then I can just enjoy the sounds in their own right. The human voice is a very versatile instrument and can make some really cool sounds.
(NIN tie-in: I think The Becoming is one of their best vocals-forward songs, not because of the lyrics, but because the choice of syllables in certain sections is very musical: e.g. "me that you know" is soft and open, but then "had some second thoughts" transitions into harder syllables, followed sharp explosions of "scabs" and "sore" in the next line. The sound communicates more than the lyric.)
(Edit 1 hour later because I realize I forgot the best part: the final "me that you know" is followed up with "made up of wires", while "scabs" and "sore" have been replaced with "with" and "away". Musically, there is a progression from the call-and-response "eee aaa ooo ohh? suh! suh! suh!" to "eee aaa ooo ohh? wuh, wuh, wuh..." The sharp "S" sounds evoke the imagery of close and present danger, a rattlesnake or steam/gas leaking under pressure, whereas the "W" sounds are more distant, like a bird flying overhead or the rhythmic thrum of a fan. For me this emphasizes the sense of something kind of becoming weaker and smaller before the eventual transformation at the end of the song. Thus vocals help create a thematic progression even without the lyrical context.)
But I also think that treating music like an ideal form of communication is a bit of an elitist perspective. There are some artists who get upset when people don't get the message that they are trying to convey, but I think most artists understand that the act of releasing a work to the public means they no longer have control over it. People are going to interpret the work however they want, they will weave it into the narrative of their own lives and make it into something different and unexpected and that's actually the beauty of sharing art in the first place - it enriches everybody. I think the problem comes from gatekeeper-like fans who imagine that the original intent of the artist is pure and sacred and anyone who is interprets it differently is a lesser fan, unworthy of the gift that was bestowed upon them. I think this kind of framing is unproductive, since to me all art is communal and ephemeral and if it's not being shared to elevate the collective conscious then what was the point to share it at all? People don't need to listen to music to wallow in someone else's ego trip, then they could just go to work, or watch the news, or whatever.
I am not so serious about music though I do enjoy and appreciate it.
Sounds like we agree about the ability of language to distract from music and it sounds like you are far more interested in the tonal layer of music that I am. It sounds you get more joy from its raw material.
I agree that language isn't required for communication. I also accept that music can be enjoyed without language and also in a language you don't understand. Where I think we might diverge is the depth of communicative capacity for both tones and language. I like the idea that there could be communicative depths in music that my attention defaults cause me to miss and are available to me with intention. I would accept that in some dimensions music can more deeply communicate than language, as I believe the converse. However, the "volume/area of" meaning that I was assign as more-or-less exclusively or best communicated with tones is smaller than that I would assign more-or-less exclusively to language (and more precisely to the invocation of the concepts referenced by language). Of course, my leaning is to believe that they can communicate even more effectively together in complement.
I'm not sure where the "music as an ideal form of communication" comment came from. Perhaps this was you indulging in something dear to you or proactively defending/limiting to protect or increase understanding? Regardless, I agree that conceptual transmission can occur in many ways of varying bandwidth.
There was a bit in my comment that you write adjacently to here about which I felt a little embarrassed. It was trying to summarize the communications and claim definite subjects. I was a bit embarrassed because I agree that many artists revel in the unfettered nature of their art. Claiming a particular topic can be seen as an attempt to limit and simplify which would be at least a little sad. There are definitely alternative concepts and summaries that I could have written and feel were covered just as plausibly. That flexibility is, I believe, often intentional and many songs invite the listener to explorations of the many possible dimensions and one can get lost into meta-narratives and their own dimensional possibilities. To briefly revisit the communication bandwidth topic, text has been found one of the least effective transmission forms. To any extent I seemed to be gatekeeping, I apologize and did not intend to (though talking about my internal confusion could be interpreted in such a way). To any extent you were concerned about gatekeeping, I didn't notice it. On the other hand, I could interpret that as a set up for the beautiful thesis you end with and with which I agree. I can think of other reasons than raising the collective consciousness, the mass transmission of messages meant to draw in a particular as yet unidentified individual for more proximal relationship (ignoring the intentional creation of parasocial feelings), to gather and/or organize communities for social experimentation or practice, or just collect capital. Still, the raising of consciousness, the sharing of perspectives, mutually supported growth, and so on is part of what I love in art most.
Thank you for the discussion, it has enriched my weekend.
I don't have much more to add, but just to clarify where "music as an ideal form of communication" came from - it was in response to you saying "music is ... a form of compressed communication [and my favorite songs communicate] some pinnacle thought or understanding". Personally I do not think that that music is an efficient way to communicate specific ideas, exactly because it is so open to interpretation.
I did not mean to imply that you specifically were gatekeeping, I was making more of a general comment on how people sometimes try to use "the artist's true intent" as some kind of post-hoc reasoning around how a piece of music should be appreciated. This comes across as silly to me because if listeners need a meta channel to understand what the artist was trying to say, then that just reinforces the point that music is not a very efficient means of communication and any serious communication should have occurred on the meta channel in the first place. That leads to my notion that music (and art more broadly) is just the contribution of new expressions into the sea of culture we all exist in as human beings, and there is no particular right or wrong way to experience that.
I think that’s the first I’ve heard The Downward Spiral described as too commercial.
You don’t think Pretty Hate Machine is filled with anger and confusion?
I think if you were to look within, you’d find you were the right age to be receptive to the earlier albums, and by ‘94 you’d grown out of the level of angst.
I think it just depends how into industrial music a person is/was.
Reznor's genius to me was in taking industrial music and making it catchy, radio friendly and basically pop.
Completely commercial compared to anything I can think of in industrial music from the time on back. Completely filled with confusion and anger though compared to say Whitney Houston from the time.
In '94 my angst was still accelerating. You're right that PHM contained expressions of anger and confusion. It just felt more whole than TDS.
RE commercial success [0]:
> Nine Inch Nails' second studio album, The Downward Spiral, entered the Billboard 200 at number two,[57] and is the band's highest seller in the US, over four million copies, among five million worldwide.[58]
The best way I ever heard this sentiment phrased was "the most radio friendly single on the album had the refrain 'I want to fuck you like an animal'".
You also can't separate the song from the music video.
It is a really catchy song, really cool video that got a ton of MTV air time, really interesting electronic music and he found a way to say “fuck you like an animal”.
I was never a big NIN fan but I remember instantly loving that music video the first time I seen it on MTV.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm sort of with you, though.
That said, I've come to appreciate The Downward Spiral. But if that was Sonic The Hedgehog 2, With Teeth (and parts of Year Zero) was Sonic The Hedgehog 3. i.e. the master work that built on everything they had learned before they ran out of ideas. The Slip is their Sonic and Knuckles, where they start going in a different, less-cool direction. Of course this is all very much my opinion, man. :)
I should have never listened to NIN, but I have; too much. It started with Quake, then a neighbor gifted me a CD of Pretty Hate Machine and I followed it with Broken and The Downward Spiral, which then was the path I went myself.
The Quake soundtrack was what got me too. Sorry to hear that. Music certainly is a powerful modulator of the psyche. It can be devastating like a drug if young vulnerable and unprepared.
I'll always feel slightly guilty when I look at the box-set of "And all that could have been" on my shelf.
I bought it from a second-hand music store years ago and when I took it up to the checkout to pay for it ( for it was the days of cash ) the cashier looked heartbroken.
"I'd been saving up to buy that," she whimpered.
I bought it anyway.
I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN collective...
I've seen the term "hagiography" 8 times in the past three days in articles of different topics, having never heard the word before. Being that English is my second language, but the one I consume the most content in (more than my first), I pay close attention to word patterns and have seen the language evolve with my own eyes.
But this one is weird. I think it's similar to the LLMs fixation with "delve", my guess is people are using AI to suggest articles.
English is my first language and I had to look it up too (at least the 'hagi' part!) I think it's a relatively-rarely-used word for sure! Maybe it's recently re-entered the zeitgeist? (And there's another fairly-uncommon word for ya! Hehe)
I too have noticed this word appear recently! I read a lot about politics and I believe it has shown up there mostly. Wish I could find some examples. I think it’s been in the context of cults and martyrs.
Being this article is 5 years old, it’s likely just Baader-Meinhof, feels like it happens to me every time I learn a new interesting word or concept—seems like I start seeing it everywhere.
It is a Greek word, used for Saints Icons painting, Agio (Saint) + Graphi (Writing down).
Painting in Greek is zographia, Zoi ( life/living) + Graphi.
The use case in the Article and English is mostly from "intellectuals" who like to use cool words without even knowing their meaning.
I’ll take any opportunity I can to recommend this podcast, and this episode specifically. If this article resonates with you then it is absolutely worth the listen.
the other day I was washing the dishes and in my head I started hearing "listen to the sound, of my big black boots"
My favorite collab is the record he did with Saul Williams, it is a banger. You can hear TR all over that thing, and that was the one (or released at the same time as the one) that was given away for whatever you wanted to pay for it.
I just don't think his wife's voice is that great and I don't think the music is that inspired.
It probably depends though how much Coil a person listened to. I just don't think the music is powerful or weird enough if you are going to call the band "How to Destroy Angels".
Fascinating bit of writing. I appreciate that it’s personal memoir as much as biography.
Making Finck into a “mystic” feels a bit unfair. He’s a working musician and a sideman, not a rock star frontman. He takes his craft seriously, the technique of performance and the musicianship. Because he is not “in the band”, he will not be the subject of interviews. His job is not to provide you with any more insights than what you can take away yourself from the art he creates.
I’ve made this mistake myself — assuming that because someone communicates in ways that are obscure, they must be concealing some greater truth. Building up that expectation inevitably leads to heartbreak.
I imagine one of those memes that begins with the trad girl saying “thank you” and the subject of her attention would say “I’m literally just an introverted, neurodivergent musician.”
I'd go a lot further than that. The entire article, while informative and entertaining also has major stalker vibes. I guess some fans just don't know when to stop.
I've been listening to NIN for 30-something years at this point.
I will never stop.
This article is very well written and while I can't identify with everything the author describes a whole lot of it lands. I'm really glad I found this on HN today!
...A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
kind of crazy coincidence in the recent ethiopian conflict a new approach they used was to nail the uterus of women with 9 inch nails to make sure entire tribes are reduced in numbers but without raising genocide alarms
Going through a lot of iterations until one band name "stuck", true to his obsessive working ethos in finding the "right" sound for his music.
> L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?
T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names.
Trent Reznor really has one of the greatest “maturation” processes of a musical artist that I can think of. His more recent work on The Social Network and The Vietnam War is such a refined, minimalistic version of the specific sound he started forming 20+ years earlier. Not all artists manage to mature in such an elegant way; many never end up quite matching their earlier works, or head into entirely different directions.
Also, a fun random fact: Reznor’s uncle, I believe, ran a heating or HVAC company in the Pittsburgh area. You can still find the occasional industrial device with the REZNOR name on the side.
https://partner.reznorhvac.com/en/as/products/product-unit-h...
These are very common in Canada still and anytime I see one I point at it and make the same joke “Looks it’s Vent Reznor” and my girlfriend has never once laughed. Oh well.
If you keep doing it she's sure to get it eventually.
Now, now, that’s just a Terrible Lie
I mean, compare "Spam" the Monte Python sketch against "Four Candles" (the Two Ronnies). Four Candles is hilarious the first time you hear it, but Spam only really works on repetition which is why the sketch iterates internally so it's repeated within itself.
On the other hand while "Mastermind" (also the Two Ronnies) is hilarious if you understand the cultural context, you can get "Spam" with no context whatsoever, it's funny because they keep saying "spam".
All to say - maybe the repetition works eventually? Ask again after a decade of marriage :D
Also the Super Mario World fortress boss for some reason https://www.mariowiki.com/Reznor
When I saw NIN on PBS's Austin City Limits in 2014, I knew Trent had gone 'mainstream' in his maturity (with Robin performing too)..
https://www.pbs.org/video/austin-city-limits-nine-inch-nails...
It only takes me 3-4 somber notes from a song in a movie or TV show these days to quickly identify it as NIN or Trent\Atticus. The latest was in the season 3 finale of Invincible...
https://fandomwire.com/invincible-season-3-soundtrack-all-so...
Atticus Ross did shogun recently too ... You can feel the non vibes in the intro
Pretty heat machine.
The ideal devices for a warm place.
Great post. I've been a fan of NIN for over 30 years and no other band has had such a profound impact on my life. This is saying a lot because I've always been heavily into almost all genres. My biased opinion is that there's something for everyone somewhere in their discography because the music produced has varied quite a bit over the years. If you listen to them and like what you hear, they just announced a new tour.
"It instilled a belief in me that I still have to this day: that any spiritual ailment can be cured by playing music at maximum volume in a small, dark room."
This is so true to me but I never thought of putting it to words like that. I love music and darkness so much that during some especially intense moments in live shows I've been to I close my eyes instead of looking at the band.
I've been to only a few concerts, relatively, 2 raves, maybe 6 concerts, and a few dozen clubs. only the "raves" were loud enough to "cease visual processing" as my sibling said. We saw Ron D Core and Omar Santana spin at a Chinese restaurant that had a dance floor in Los Angeles, and it was so loud (not distorted, just pure air movement and wattage) that the needles were jumping. with quarters on them. Omar Santana's "metal gabber" was transcendental.
I agree! The best concerts I've been to were the ones where I was so engaged in the music that I felt compelled to close my eyes for most of the experience.
Temporarily disable visual processing and redirect all the available power to audio processing. Very Star Trekish. :)
Don’t forget to polarize your hull plating as well.
I've only read parts of this so far, but it's pretty extraordinary. I'm going to have to commit more time later today to read the whole thing.
I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and music in general, but the way this is written is a few levels beyond what I think I'm even capable of feeling.
tangent: Inverse Phase's "pretty eight machine"
https://inversephase.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-eight-machine...
> Head Like I/O was the track that got this entire album started. I was at Ohayocon 2011 and joking around with Dave, Dirk, and Carlson about chiptune covers, and the topic of Nine Inch Nails came up. Being a fan, I mentioned that lots of NIN songs would lend themselves to chiptunes rather well, and I decided I would try to surprise everyone with a little bit of Head Like a Hole. In a bout of productivity, I was able to do a rough edit of about two minutes of the song in a day, and the surprise was a big success. The guys all pushed me to consider doing a Nine Inch Nails EP or album.
> I did this track on the Commodore 64 because I got into a conversation with Carlson about it first, and I hadn't given the C64 enough love. The idea to use more systems for the album formed as the idea for the album itself took shape.
The first track didn't sell it, but i started on "Downloadin' it" and from there it's all good, I especially liked "Something You Didn't Ever Have"
Pretty Hate Machine was the first real album i bought with my own money, right around when CD boomboxes became affordable, 1994 or so. And that's probably why the track above hit different for me. My mom hated that song.
I'm always a little confused by people such as this one who loved Downward Spiral so much. It was a slide into confusion started in Broken, away from the honesty and struggle embodied in Pretty Hate Machine. It was the Pinnacle of the band's bowing to the commercial market and fall into anger which it didn't recover, IMO, from until reaching a more mature pinnacle (at least in regard to what I wanted from it and what drew me to it) on With Teeth. Right Where It Belongs is one of my all-time favorite songs wherein they both challenge the exterior and interior to greater truth, greater honesty.
I always saw TDS as a concept album in the vein of his later, more recent soundtracks. It feels more coherently atmospheric in ways earlier albums didn’t, to me.
With Teeth is actually where I think he went too far into “regular rock music” territory, with the result that it sounds generic and flat to me.
With Teeth is his first sober album. He wanted the stripped back rock feel so it would sound different from the previous.
Well, I think they address why they loved it so much in the article, hell, before the first section is finished, even.
Music can be many things at once, and you can be touched by some of the things it is, even if others don't hit for you.
I can't deny the first section described that. My confusion isn't about what the claims are or what surface knowledge presents.
As a peer comment noted, an outlet for anger is part of it, a starting point, and was useful to me too. My comment is about how that album more than others invited me to stay stuck there, remain clad and "protected" from my vulnerability. Tearing down, destroying, and randomizing are always easier than solving, creating, healing, loving, and seeing things just/right. More relevant in this context, startups are hard. Being useful is work.
The beauty in the brashness of NIN is what I believe starts with feeling less alone in your heart and leads to loving yourself and spreading that into your ambient surrounds.
As you note, I am sharing what this art is to me. I cannot say that must or should be what it is to any other person. I still hope that we can be less ashamed and equally vigorous with our caring.
> feeling less alone
For me it was The Knife. Making me realize there are other people feeling the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDdVVPOcLhM
edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UeQLO43a2Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPD8Ja64mRU
you might know a cover of this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJCE48VnI1o
Silent Shout is a fantastic album, but "Heartbeats" is the GOAT.
I feel a bit sad that The Knife evolved into a strange place in their later work that I don't really understand. I guess my tastes are a little too basic to follow along.
It's not you, they unfortunately slid into self indulgence.
Eh, to me the lyrics are what make NIN hard to deal with as a grown adult. Meanwhile Ruiner (Version) remains the best song they ever did.
Charlie Clouser's production was unparalleled at the time in the rock/industrial arena. So clean, so meticulous, it was life-changing. Over in the electronic space there were a few psytrance artists doing similar stuff, but I feel like that style of production only bubbled up into mainstream pop in the 2000s (think Britney Spears - Piece of Me). Nowadays most everything sounds just as pristine, but that just goes to show how well a track like Ruiner holds up. The opening 2 minutes still send a shiver down my spine - they're perfection!
I think that's why the TDS/FDTS era of NIN is remembered so fondly - because it's the brief period where some of their stuff sounded ahead of its time.
And thanks and sharing. As I got into what I wrote and decided I wanted to express, I got pretty far from responding to what you wrote. Sorry for that and still, thank you.
The sonic cleanliness of NIN is absolutely one of the things that I love and I agree that PHM was raw compared to a far more refined TDS and what follows. The intentional arrangement or emphasis of sounds so that you do or don't have to deconflict and separate them increases the emotional and psychological fabric of the music immensely.
This makes me think of a past friend who kind of blew my mind by reporting and then insisting (when I struggled to believe) that he didn't really listen to the words in music and sometimes didn't even hear them. I totally appreciate that many people experience music almost exclusively as a tonal experience and it's fascinating to me. Music can be great on that level. I can't separate it and appreciate a song that has more thoroughly attended to more of my dimensions. Songs that satisfy that cleanliness only tonally seem incomplete and far less satisfying down to jarring. Examples of that end of the spectrum include happy songs about domestic violence that don't also punch with irony, where it's like they haven't figured out what an abusive existence they describe. I get the importance of sending telegrams from experiences we have had but too often it feels like they're going to be heard in ways that subconsciously replicate ala meme theory (at least what I know of the academic form).
For me, music is an assemblage of the aural, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and surely more as a form of compressed communication. My favorite songs sound incredible while arranging every piece you reasonably need to assemble some pinnacle thought or understanding. A very grand-in-scope example is Pink Floyd's (actually written by Polly Samson) High Hopes which discusses social and economic dynamics. I heard it later in life and it is of a much different sound but satisfies the same passionate desire in me. Another includes Bjork's Mutual Core discussing the challenges of navigating the paradoxes of individual agency within romantic unions under differences of being and definition. These and those like them each seem like someone who has done the work to drill into multi-dimensional clarity and done the work to share it in a way that reinforces and works to elevate humanity.
Sorry to carry on so but thank you for stimulating this one.
No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I bought hundreds, and even still today I continue to buy digital music, "crate digging" on Bandcamp for hours. But I don't really listen to the words, I find they often interfere with what the raw emotion of the music would have been without them.
I mentioned psytrance, and that's an example of a genre that is largely instrumental, but when they do include a vocal sample, it's invariably some kind of vapid nonsense about taking drugs, and to me - unless the song is deliberately silly - that often undermines the impact of what the music was saying on its own.
I don't buy the idea that vocals are necessary for communication, because otherwise nobody would ever listen to lyrical music in a language they don't understand, except people do and it's very popular. I often prefer to listen to music in a language I don't understand, if anyway I am forced to listen to vocal music, since then I can just enjoy the sounds in their own right. The human voice is a very versatile instrument and can make some really cool sounds.
(NIN tie-in: I think The Becoming is one of their best vocals-forward songs, not because of the lyrics, but because the choice of syllables in certain sections is very musical: e.g. "me that you know" is soft and open, but then "had some second thoughts" transitions into harder syllables, followed sharp explosions of "scabs" and "sore" in the next line. The sound communicates more than the lyric.)
(Edit 1 hour later because I realize I forgot the best part: the final "me that you know" is followed up with "made up of wires", while "scabs" and "sore" have been replaced with "with" and "away". Musically, there is a progression from the call-and-response "eee aaa ooo ohh? suh! suh! suh!" to "eee aaa ooo ohh? wuh, wuh, wuh..." The sharp "S" sounds evoke the imagery of close and present danger, a rattlesnake or steam/gas leaking under pressure, whereas the "W" sounds are more distant, like a bird flying overhead or the rhythmic thrum of a fan. For me this emphasizes the sense of something kind of becoming weaker and smaller before the eventual transformation at the end of the song. Thus vocals help create a thematic progression even without the lyrical context.)
But I also think that treating music like an ideal form of communication is a bit of an elitist perspective. There are some artists who get upset when people don't get the message that they are trying to convey, but I think most artists understand that the act of releasing a work to the public means they no longer have control over it. People are going to interpret the work however they want, they will weave it into the narrative of their own lives and make it into something different and unexpected and that's actually the beauty of sharing art in the first place - it enriches everybody. I think the problem comes from gatekeeper-like fans who imagine that the original intent of the artist is pure and sacred and anyone who is interprets it differently is a lesser fan, unworthy of the gift that was bestowed upon them. I think this kind of framing is unproductive, since to me all art is communal and ephemeral and if it's not being shared to elevate the collective conscious then what was the point to share it at all? People don't need to listen to music to wallow in someone else's ego trip, then they could just go to work, or watch the news, or whatever.
In that case, thank you for indulging me.
I am not so serious about music though I do enjoy and appreciate it.
Sounds like we agree about the ability of language to distract from music and it sounds like you are far more interested in the tonal layer of music that I am. It sounds you get more joy from its raw material.
I agree that language isn't required for communication. I also accept that music can be enjoyed without language and also in a language you don't understand. Where I think we might diverge is the depth of communicative capacity for both tones and language. I like the idea that there could be communicative depths in music that my attention defaults cause me to miss and are available to me with intention. I would accept that in some dimensions music can more deeply communicate than language, as I believe the converse. However, the "volume/area of" meaning that I was assign as more-or-less exclusively or best communicated with tones is smaller than that I would assign more-or-less exclusively to language (and more precisely to the invocation of the concepts referenced by language). Of course, my leaning is to believe that they can communicate even more effectively together in complement.
I'm not sure where the "music as an ideal form of communication" comment came from. Perhaps this was you indulging in something dear to you or proactively defending/limiting to protect or increase understanding? Regardless, I agree that conceptual transmission can occur in many ways of varying bandwidth.
There was a bit in my comment that you write adjacently to here about which I felt a little embarrassed. It was trying to summarize the communications and claim definite subjects. I was a bit embarrassed because I agree that many artists revel in the unfettered nature of their art. Claiming a particular topic can be seen as an attempt to limit and simplify which would be at least a little sad. There are definitely alternative concepts and summaries that I could have written and feel were covered just as plausibly. That flexibility is, I believe, often intentional and many songs invite the listener to explorations of the many possible dimensions and one can get lost into meta-narratives and their own dimensional possibilities. To briefly revisit the communication bandwidth topic, text has been found one of the least effective transmission forms. To any extent I seemed to be gatekeeping, I apologize and did not intend to (though talking about my internal confusion could be interpreted in such a way). To any extent you were concerned about gatekeeping, I didn't notice it. On the other hand, I could interpret that as a set up for the beautiful thesis you end with and with which I agree. I can think of other reasons than raising the collective consciousness, the mass transmission of messages meant to draw in a particular as yet unidentified individual for more proximal relationship (ignoring the intentional creation of parasocial feelings), to gather and/or organize communities for social experimentation or practice, or just collect capital. Still, the raising of consciousness, the sharing of perspectives, mutually supported growth, and so on is part of what I love in art most.
Thank you for the discussion, it has enriched my weekend.
I don't have much more to add, but just to clarify where "music as an ideal form of communication" came from - it was in response to you saying "music is ... a form of compressed communication [and my favorite songs communicate] some pinnacle thought or understanding". Personally I do not think that that music is an efficient way to communicate specific ideas, exactly because it is so open to interpretation.
I did not mean to imply that you specifically were gatekeeping, I was making more of a general comment on how people sometimes try to use "the artist's true intent" as some kind of post-hoc reasoning around how a piece of music should be appreciated. This comes across as silly to me because if listeners need a meta channel to understand what the artist was trying to say, then that just reinforces the point that music is not a very efficient means of communication and any serious communication should have occurred on the meta channel in the first place. That leads to my notion that music (and art more broadly) is just the contribution of new expressions into the sea of culture we all exist in as human beings, and there is no particular right or wrong way to experience that.
Same. I appreciate his music style and vibe but his lyrics, not so much..
Being an angry young man drew me to Downward Spiral, if I'm being honest.
I appreciate the admission. I can't deny benefitting from that too. More in my response to this comments peer.
I think that’s the first I’ve heard The Downward Spiral described as too commercial.
You don’t think Pretty Hate Machine is filled with anger and confusion?
I think if you were to look within, you’d find you were the right age to be receptive to the earlier albums, and by ‘94 you’d grown out of the level of angst.
I think it just depends how into industrial music a person is/was.
Reznor's genius to me was in taking industrial music and making it catchy, radio friendly and basically pop.
Completely commercial compared to anything I can think of in industrial music from the time on back. Completely filled with confusion and anger though compared to say Whitney Houston from the time.
In '94 my angst was still accelerating. You're right that PHM contained expressions of anger and confusion. It just felt more whole than TDS.
RE commercial success [0]:
> Nine Inch Nails' second studio album, The Downward Spiral, entered the Billboard 200 at number two,[57] and is the band's highest seller in the US, over four million copies, among five million worldwide.[58]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inch_Nails
The album sold because he found a way to say “fuck you like an animal” and get it played on the radio.
It has to be the least commercial-sounding record to chart that high by far.
The best way I ever heard this sentiment phrased was "the most radio friendly single on the album had the refrain 'I want to fuck you like an animal'".
You also can't separate the song from the music video.
It is a really catchy song, really cool video that got a ton of MTV air time, really interesting electronic music and he found a way to say “fuck you like an animal”.
I was never a big NIN fan but I remember instantly loving that music video the first time I seen it on MTV.
Yes, sex and violence sell.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm sort of with you, though.
That said, I've come to appreciate The Downward Spiral. But if that was Sonic The Hedgehog 2, With Teeth (and parts of Year Zero) was Sonic The Hedgehog 3. i.e. the master work that built on everything they had learned before they ran out of ideas. The Slip is their Sonic and Knuckles, where they start going in a different, less-cool direction. Of course this is all very much my opinion, man. :)
This is my favorite metaphor today, and I read TFA which has lots.
Downward Spiral - Sonic 2 The Fragile - Sonic 3
I should have never listened to NIN, but I have; too much. It started with Quake, then a neighbor gifted me a CD of Pretty Hate Machine and I followed it with Broken and The Downward Spiral, which then was the path I went myself.
The Quake soundtrack was what got me too. Sorry to hear that. Music certainly is a powerful modulator of the psyche. It can be devastating like a drug if young vulnerable and unprepared.
I'll always feel slightly guilty when I look at the box-set of "And all that could have been" on my shelf.
I bought it from a second-hand music store years ago and when I took it up to the checkout to pay for it ( for it was the days of cash ) the cashier looked heartbroken.
"I'd been saving up to buy that," she whimpered.
I bought it anyway.
I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN collective...
> I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN collective...
You won't find absolution here; shame!
I've seen the term "hagiography" 8 times in the past three days in articles of different topics, having never heard the word before. Being that English is my second language, but the one I consume the most content in (more than my first), I pay close attention to word patterns and have seen the language evolve with my own eyes.
But this one is weird. I think it's similar to the LLMs fixation with "delve", my guess is people are using AI to suggest articles.
English is my first language and I had to look it up too (at least the 'hagi' part!) I think it's a relatively-rarely-used word for sure! Maybe it's recently re-entered the zeitgeist? (And there's another fairly-uncommon word for ya! Hehe)
Maybe? Or this might be a case of the 'Frequency Illusion'[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
I too have noticed this word appear recently! I read a lot about politics and I believe it has shown up there mostly. Wish I could find some examples. I think it’s been in the context of cults and martyrs.
Being this article is 5 years old, it’s likely just Baader-Meinhof, feels like it happens to me every time I learn a new interesting word or concept—seems like I start seeing it everywhere.
Chase it with sudden repeated exposure to "hermeneutics"!
It is a Greek word, used for Saints Icons painting, Agio (Saint) + Graphi (Writing down).
Painting in Greek is zographia, Zoi ( life/living) + Graphi. The use case in the Article and English is mostly from "intellectuals" who like to use cool words without even knowing their meaning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
My favourite NiN track, Call Me A Hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lm1FL7gWl4
A bit of an aside, but I love this mashup and hope some of you will enjoy it as well.
And now for something completely different ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S42mc0mcrE
My fave by NiN
I think this is what you want
https://youtu.be/3uxTpyCdriY?si=Au5WAA8jxi66JVG3
I’ll take any opportunity I can to recommend this podcast, and this episode specifically. If this article resonates with you then it is absolutely worth the listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-songs-that-explain-...
I don’t know if I like NIN, but I love Trent Reznor’s collaborations with Atticus Ross and I love How to Destroy Angels.
the other day I was washing the dishes and in my head I started hearing "listen to the sound, of my big black boots"
My favorite collab is the record he did with Saul Williams, it is a banger. You can hear TR all over that thing, and that was the one (or released at the same time as the one) that was given away for whatever you wanted to pay for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz6VQCNkjAU&list=PLaqsB45loh...
My wife is going to hate me, but I am going to listen to this rn on my monitors, sorry honey!
I just don't think his wife's voice is that great and I don't think the music is that inspired.
It probably depends though how much Coil a person listened to. I just don't think the music is powerful or weird enough if you are going to call the band "How to Destroy Angels".
Fascinating bit of writing. I appreciate that it’s personal memoir as much as biography.
Making Finck into a “mystic” feels a bit unfair. He’s a working musician and a sideman, not a rock star frontman. He takes his craft seriously, the technique of performance and the musicianship. Because he is not “in the band”, he will not be the subject of interviews. His job is not to provide you with any more insights than what you can take away yourself from the art he creates.
I’ve made this mistake myself — assuming that because someone communicates in ways that are obscure, they must be concealing some greater truth. Building up that expectation inevitably leads to heartbreak.
I imagine one of those memes that begins with the trad girl saying “thank you” and the subject of her attention would say “I’m literally just an introverted, neurodivergent musician.”
I've been listening to NIN for 30-something years at this point. I will never stop. This article is very well written and while I can't identify with everything the author describes a whole lot of it lands. I'm really glad I found this on HN today! ...A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
any idea why they chose 9 inch nails?
kind of crazy coincidence in the recent ethiopian conflict a new approach they used was to nail the uterus of women with 9 inch nails to make sure entire tribes are reduced in numbers but without raising genocide alarms
Going through a lot of iterations until one band name "stuck", true to his obsessive working ethos in finding the "right" sound for his music.
> L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?
T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150813023119/http://www.thenin...
As in, why the band chose the name? It's a reference to the length of the nails that Jesus was supposedly crucified with.
Also Twenty-three Centimeter Nails wasn't nearly as catchy
I hope this comment gets as much appreciation as it deserves.