Explaining the Obsession With Nine Inch Nails

It is August 1994. In the middle of their Self-Destruct tour, Nine Inch Nails make a stop in upstate New York to perform at Woodstock ‘94—“three more days of peace and love” broadcast live on pay-per-view. The first act to take the main stage after darkness falls, the band is ostensibly the opening act for Saturday evening’s heavy hitters: Metallica and Aerosmith. They’ve played festivals before, even opened for Guns n Roses once upon a time, but they’ve never seen anything like this. It’s been pouring off and on all day. The crowd is soaked and caked in mud, so the band decides to follow suit. By the time they slip onto the stage to the sounds of “Pinion,” they look like a gang of misfits that might have come together in the crowd just a few minutes before.

They play that way, too. The set, though charged with an energy they’d never expected, is a mess. They’re getting the crowd off, and the crowd is getting them off, but this is sloppy sex. The rhythm slips up here and there. The crooning is occasionally off-key.

Toward the end of the set, during “Happiness in Slavery,” one or more of the keyboards stops functioning altogether. It gets destroyed with the base of a microphone stand. If this is a tour where self-destruction is the central aesthetic, then tonight’s show is the pinnacle. They will never again play a set so gloriously fucked up.

In a living room in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, watching the pay-per-view broadcast (which isn’t actually paid for in this house, where a descrambler acts as a precursor to Napster and Kazaa), is a shy, chubby sixteen year old, just two weeks away from the start of his senior year of high school. This band isn’t something he would have listened to a year ago, when he was making mix-tapes packed with Paula Abdul, Wilson Phillips, and Belinda Carlisle. But things have changed since then. Both of his surviving grandparents have been in the hospital recently. He has the sense that things might be worse with his grandfather than the old man is letting on. Suddenly, the music of Trent Reznor is speaking to this boy. He listens carefully. Behind the anger and melancholy of the lyrics, beneath a layer-upon-layer of noise, there is a traditonal pop/rock song structure lurking. He likes these songs. He understands what his brother and his friends have been going nuts about. And when he hears the chorus to “Last” a few months later, after his grandfather is gone, after he’s been searching—aching, really—for some way to make his life make sense in the face of death, the deal is sealed, and he becomes a lifelong fan.

“This isn’t meant to last,” the chorus goes. “This is for right now!”

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If I had to explain the genesis of my obsession with Nine Inch Nails, that’s where I’d begin. I discovered the band when I was at my most fragile, and every time I needed to be destroyed and rebuilt again the music of Mr. Trent Reznor was there to provide the soundtrack.