NIN Oeuvre Blog: The Big Come Down

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 24, 2007.

In comparing 1999’s The Fragile to 1994’s The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor said, of The Fragile, “This album starts at the end, then attempts to create order from chaos, but never reaches the goal. It’s probably a bleaker album because it arrives back where it starts—[with] the same emotion.” I would argue that the song that exemplifies this theme best is a song that appears near the end of The Fragile’s second disc: “The Big Come Down”.

“The Big Come Down” is a song about the debilitating anger and self-hate that builds inside of a person when life gets so out of control that any attempts to course-correct only make matters worse.  The narrator of The Fragile wants desperately to get back to “where [he’s] from,” but, as he tells us in this song, “the closer [he gets] the worse it becomes.”

Does he even really know where he’s from? Or does he have only the slimmest of ideas about his origins? Assuming that this is the same narrator who navigated the treacherous terrain of The Downward Spiral (Trent seems to suggest that he is), did he peel away too many layers of himself to ever get back? Is the breaking down of the self that occurred on the previous record what’s keeping our narrator from reaching his goal on this one? I think that might be part of it. I think this idea that “it keeps coming from the inside” is important. In his quest to “create order from chaos,” his own worst enemy is himself. He can never get back to where he’s from, because he doesn’t want to let himself.

In terms of orchestration, “The Big Come Down” both begins and ends with a relatively distortion-free guitar. On an album that utilizes so much guitar, much of it distorted and manipulated beyond recognition, I think the choice to use such a clean tone here is telling. Given it’s placement near the end of the record, and the fact that it is followed by two songs which are ultimately concessions of defeat ("Underneath It All” and “Ripe (With Decay)"), “The Big Come Down” represents our narrator’s final failed attempt to bring order to his life. The simple refrain of that clean guitar is something he’s trying to latch onto, but it is ultimately lost in the noise of the outro and the driving instrumentation of the next track.

Trent would find a way to put his life together off record, of course, getting clean and sober during the span of time between the end of touring for The Fragile and the beginning of recording for With Teeth. But the narrator we followed through TDS and The Fragile is, I think, lost forever.