Ultimate Setlist - A Challenge

PHOTO: Nine Inch Nails Live @ Rock Oz’Arenes Festival - Avenches, Switzerland, 8.15.07 on Flickr by Nine Inch Nails Official CC BY-NC-SA

Chris’s quest to secure setlists of every concert he’s attended prompted me to think up a gauntlet to throw upon the ground for him and other readers.  As a fellow Nine Inch Nails fanatic, it was beneficial for me to meet Chris, given that my dedication to the band is nothing compared to the near-frightening depth of knowledge the man possesses in regards to the band.  How could I compete when writing about music?  Well, let’s throw out a not-so-original challenge to Chris and to all the readers: Imagine if you will that your favorite musical artist calls you up.  If you can’t suspend your disbelief, imagine that you’ve won some manner of contest.  Your favorite musician explains that you have twenty minutes to come up with a setlist.  For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s an eighty minute setlist, the length of an average CD.  Factoring in live performance interludes, this would equate to a ninety minute show.  You’re allowed to ask for any version of a song as long as it fits within these time constraints.  What do you pick?  There’s my challenge to Chris: Show me your perfect personal NIN show.  To the rest, pick your favorite artist and show me the personal concert that would permit you to die in peace afterward.

Just to show I’m a good sport, here’s my setlist for Trent and the boys in advance of Chris’s list:

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Setlist.fm - The Setlist Wiki

PHOTO: NIN setlist 01/03/07 on Flickr by ~Sweetie CC BY

It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to gather up the setlists of every concert I’ve ever been to. I started this project on one of my old Websites, and I’d been thinking about starting it back up again, but then along came Setlist.fm, which I found via this Mashable article. I was very pleased to see that their collection stretches back to at least 1995. They have the setlist for the very first concert I ever attended, a Nine Inch Nails show from January of that year. It’s definitely worth checking out. [plug]And hey, maybe looking at some old setlists will inspire you to join our 365 Songs project...[/plug]

365 Songs - Day 61

The 365 Songs Project, which was conceived by my friend and Generation Goat co-host Jon Martin, is modeled after Flickr’s 365 Days project. For Flickr’s project, you take a photo a day to chronicle your year. For 365 Songs, you do that with songs.

Jon and I will discuss some of the ups and downs of the project’s first week in the forthcoming second episode of Generation Goat, but, for now, you can check out my progress in two places: Favtape and Last.fm.

Today’s selection: “1,000,000” by Nine Inch Nails. Why, you ask? Because this morning I saw this kick-ass “live from the stage” recording of the song being performed in Australia (see the embed above, or click here to peep it on Vimeo) and because, in general, I love this song and what’s it’s all about. See my 10,000 Lies column on it, if you don’t believe me.

When The Power Goes Out on Nine Inch Nails

Ladies and gents, this is how you handle a potential PR crisis for your band, both on the day of the event and afterward. Power went out midway through a Nine Inch Nails set in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday. The video I’ve included above shows what went on behind the scenes as the crowd began to get testy. You’ve got to love that Trent Reznor and company put this out there. And me, personally, I love the little moment where they discuss a change in the set, bringing the occasional set-opener “1,000,000” up in the set order in order to kick things off on the right note, once the power comes back on.

You want to know how to win an audience and keep an audience: Pay attention to Nine Inch Nails. You may not like their music, but you’ve got to love the way they do business.

Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails To Tour Together in 2009

Over the past couple of weeks, Trent Reznor has been teasing Nine Inch Nails fans with images of “something else that’s been going on.” Just the other day, he finally posted the image you see above, confirming what many fans had been suspecting, that the original lineup of Jane’s Addiction was getting back together. Then, yesterday, Trent had this to say about what was up.

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10,000 Lies: Nightclubbing

PHOTO: Nine Inch Nails Live @ House Of Blues - Atlantic City, New Jersey, 11.06.08 (with surprise guest Peter Murphy) on Flickr by Rob Sheridan CC BY-NC-SA

One of the joys of being a Nine Inch Nails fan is getting to hear Trent Reznor rock out on just about every instrument you can imagine. But I think I have more fun listening to the man play piano than just about anything else. And nowhere in the NIN catalog are his piano chops more fun to listen to than in the band’s cover of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing”. Don’t believe me? Check it out on YouTube and see/hear it for yourself.

Continue reading.

10,000 Lies: 1,000,000

PHOTO: Nine Inch Nails Live @ Alcatraz - Milan, Italy, 4.1.07 on Flickr by Nine Inch Nails Official CC BY-NC-SA

“1,000,000” is a song that’s all about the callback, as far as I’m concerned. It begins with a nod to the pig imagery that featured so heavily on The Downward Spiral:

kind of hard
hard to see
when you crawl
on your hands and your knees
with your face
in the trough
wait your turn
while they finish you off

It continues with a potentially unconscious reference to the Aerosmith classic “Dream On” (consider “got these lines / on my face” vs. “all these lines on my face getting clearer"). It even seems to call back to the imagery of the “Down In It” video ("I jump from every rooftop").

And I haven’t even gotten to all of the vaguer references to thematic elements of The Fragile yet—“That’s enough for you / but I still need more, more more” and “I don’t feel anything at all” being the most obvious to my ear.

But the line that is the most striking to me is the line in the chorus from which the song takes its name. “I feel a million miles away,” the narrator of “1,000,000” tells us. And me, even the first time I heard it, I couldn’t help but think, “Where have I heard that before?”

Here’s where:

If I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

With it’s reference to the final verse of “Hurt,” the song “1,000,000” becomes yet another testament to wish fulfillment gone awry (a theme this week on Geek Force Five). The narrator of “1,000,000” has been given the chance that the narrator of “Hurt” was begging for. He has been given the chance to start again, “a million miles away.” He has been given the chance to “keep himself.” But he is quickly discovering the double-edged sword of wish fulfillment. Yes, he has been given a fresh start, and yes, he can keep himself. But, in order to do so, he has been forced to detach himself from everyone else. And that isn’t working out so well. He jumps from every rooftop, and though it is “so high, so far to fall” he ends up proclaiming that, thanks to his new start, he doesn’t “feel anything at all.”

The narrator of “Hurt” didn’t want to hurt anymore. But I don’t think he wanted to abandon feeling altogether. And it’s killing him that it’s an either/or choice. Yet again, he is dissatisfied with where he has ended up ("After all this time / and I still haven’t found my place") and one can only hope that, eventually, he will find someone and/or someplace that makes him happy.

10,000 Lies: Non Entity

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the last thing I expected was a new Nine Inch Nails song. And yet, when the ReAct Now benefit happened within weeks of the disaster, there was Trent Reznor on live TV with a piano and a boombox. The song he debuted that day was “Non Entity”.

I’ll get to the song in a moment, because I think any analysis of this performance has to begin with the sparseness of it. You see, this, my friends, was Nine Inch Nails Unplugged. The band had never performed on the ubiquitous MTV program back in the day, but what Trent Reznor proved to his audience here, both here and with his performance at Bridge School Benefit at around that same time, was that a stripped-down Nine Inch Nails could work just as well as the stripped-down version of Nirvana once did.

The minimalist arrangement of “Non Entity” actually remains the definitive version for me, so much so that the live, full-band version found on Beside You in Time is jarring and almost unlistenable. For me, the song will never sound right if anything is added to the mix other than a piano, a vocal, and a drum-machine (played through a boombox, of course).

Lyrically, whether intentional or not, the song works well as a Katrina tribute, particularly in the final chorus.

Here’s how the song goes:

The sky is not the same
shade of blue.
Every single thing
I believe isn’t true.
Missing in a maze of monochrome.
How did I get here?
How can I go home?

The echoes in my eyes,
of all they used to see,
burning down the world--
the ashes and debris.
And all that’s left of me:
Non entity.

Try to stand in line,
try to obey.
The ghosts of what I was
keep getting in the way.
Staring at the sun,
blinded by the light.
Now I’m afraid I’m fading out of sight.

The echoes in my eyes,
of all they used to see,
burning down the world--
the ashes and debris.
And all that’s left of you,
and all that’s left of me,
all have washed away.
Non-entity.

The words are vague enough to apply to just about anything, but when I think about the fact that Trent spent more than a couple of years living in New Orleans himself I do find myself straying toward the “It’s about Katrina” side of the argument, rather than the “It’s not” side.

The two lines that prove a problem are from the chorus: “burning down the world-- / the ashes and debris”. Obviously, unless you were stuck out in the Gulf of Mexico on a drilling platform that was being rattled by explosions, the hurricane wouldn’t have burned down the world so much as drowned it. But there most certainly was debris, so…

I think the way around that problem is to view those two lines as kind of flashback. They are preceded by the line about the echoes in his eyes, after all. Viewed this way, the song becomes a sort of lyrical sequel to “Burn” (from the soundtrack to Natural Born Killers). In “Burn”, the narrator screams that he wants to burn the whole world down. The narrator of “Non Entity” seems to have done just that, and come to regret it.

And now he’s finding that, as a refugee from his own past, he has something in common with those who are suddenly refugees from a much more massive catastrophe than his self-immolation. Notice the addition of the lines “and all that’s left of you” and “all have washed away” in the second chorus. Those are the lines that really seal the deal for me. No longer is the narrator singing of fire and fire alone; water has entered the equation. And I’ve got to believe that means something.

Once those lines have been sung, it’s impossible for me not to go backwards and re-experience the song in a whole new way. It is not just about the downfall and heartbreak of an individual. It is suddenly about the many instead of the one. Everything they believe—that the government will rescue them, will help them rebuild—isn’t true. They try to stand in line, try to obey. But who they are—black, poor—keeps getting in the way of them receiving proper treatment and proper respect. Staring at the sun, they are blinded by the light that they hope will burn all of this water away. But judging by the way their country has reacted to their plight, they have just cause to believe that they are fading out of sight.

Worth Your Consideration #022

• The February issue of Empire features several photos of the upcoming film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Among them, the shot I’ve included above. Let me tell you: seeing the Phelps twins in what appears to be Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes sets my mind at ease about the upcoming film. If they’re keeping this scene, then they’re going to get the adaptation right, in my humble opinion.
• CineLive magazine has some new photos, too.
• Oh, and Entertainment Weekly has a brief preview.
• In other movie news, Ain’t It Cool continues their uniformly doom-and-gloom coverage of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine with a brief item on that film’s latest promotional image. Oh well. I’m still excited.
• In comics news, the Associated Press reported this week that President Elect Barack Obama would be appearing in an upcoming issue of Amazing Spider-Man. The issue, #583 of the series, hits the stands this Wednesday. I’m guessing it’ll be sold out within a couple of hours, but we’ll see.
• The legal fight between Warner Brothers and Fox over Watchmen may be coming to a close, reports AICN. Nobody’s sure how much money is changing hands, but even a penny is more than Fox deserves, according to what I’ve been reading. Bright side: at least this means the movie may actually come out, after all.
• Back to comics (as opposed to comic book adaptations): Newsarama has an interesting piece up on comic book shops suggesting that one of the keys to success in the specialty shop arena is opting out of stocking back issues. It’s an interesting bit of advice, and the comic shops I’ve been inside recently all seem to be taking it to heart. I miss back issues, but I’m becoming much more of a trade paperback guy myself.
• Just because I can’t get over how cool it is that my favorite band is giving away 405 gigs of free HD concert video, here’s a Mashable article about how much more awesome Nine Inch Nails is when compared to Metallica.
• Way on the other end of the Awesomeness Scale as far as most people are concerned (though not me, because I think they’re just as awesome), Aerosmith can’t wait to get back into the studio. Seriously, man, if you haven’t heard their blues record Honkin on Bobo, you should give it a spin. It gives hope that they’ll actually do something closer to 1970s Aerosmith than 1990s Aerosmith, and that could be really nifty. At least I think so.
• Okay, now that I’ve lost all of your respect by admitting I’m an Aerosmith nut, let’s talk Lost and try to win it back (your respect, that is). The title of the eleventh episode of season five will be “Whatever Happened, Happened”. Oh, and danger might be bringing two Left Behinders together, two that we might not expect. Well, unless, like me, you were seeing the signs of this development as far back as the finale of season three...
• If you are so overwhelmed by my geekiness that you’d like to unfriend me on Facebook or something, you should know that, if you can find nine other losers to unfriend, a Whopper might be in your future.
• Speaking of geeks: after reading about this Facebook/Burger King development, Jason Kottke did something extraordinarily awesome. He calculated Facebook’s valuation in Whoppers.
• Two more...
• My favorite blogger of all time, Mrs. Heather Armstrong (better known as Dooce), has a book coming out. It’s called It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had A Baby, A Breakdown, and A Much Needed Margarita. It comes out on March 24 and she’s doing a tour that’ll stop in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities (but sadly not Boston). I can’t wait to read it.
• Darren Aronofsky, director of The Wrestler (which I can’t wait to see), thinks that professional wrestlers belong in the Screen Actor’s Guild. Says Aronofsky, “There’s really no reason why these guys are not in SAG...They’re in front of a camera performing and doing stunts, and they should have that protection. They should have health insurance and they should be protected.” I couldn’t agree more. Regardless of what one thinks of the sport, I think it’s ridiculous to deny these performers the same union rights that are afforded to other actors and stuntpeople.

Geek Force Utterz #066 - 405 Gigs of NIN

Trent Reznor never seemed to be a big fan of CDs. Whereas vinyl records had felt like art to him, CDs felt like cold, disposable product. At least that’s they way I understand it. He certainly did his best to make the full package of each of his releases unique and as artistic as possible, but I always kind of got the sense that he was disappointed with the form he’d been given to work with.

When Napster and iTunes happened, and the writing on the wall all began to say that digital distribution was the way of the future, I kind of figured that he might hate that too. He did hate it at the beginning, at least as far as I can remember. But, beginning with the thumb-drives used to “leak” songs from Year Zero, and with the ARG which accompanied those leaks, it seems as if Mr. Reznor has fully embraced the future of the music industry in ways that few of his peers—Radiohead being the sole big exception—seem ready to. He released Ghosts I-IV on his own, entirely through his Website. He gave away The Slip for free. And now, within the past few days, he has given his fans the biggest gift yet (at least in terms of sheer file size): 405 gigs of raw HD concert video.

You may recall that record company politics stood in the way of a full-scale video release documenting the latest Nine Inch Nails tour. Well, this is a reaction to that. And what a reaction it is. Put the production in the hands of the fans. Let them see what they can do. If that isn’t a guy who understands what the future is going to be all about—and what the present is already all about, really—then I don’t know who is.

Check out more of my thoughts on the subject in today’s episode of Geek Force Utterz. You can listen in via the embed above, or by visiting Utterli.com.