NIN Oeuvre Blog: Sin

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 11, 2007.

I gave you my purity
my purity you stole

As I mentioned in my post on “That’s What I Get,” my obsessions with certain songs are often the result of a particular lyric striking a chord with me personally. My obsession with “Sin,” from Pretty Hate Machine, began in just that way.

I had always liked “Sin” as a song. Like many of the tracks on PHM, it’s eminently danceable, the driving keyboard line simply compelling you to move. And it’s an amazingly hard-edged song, almost heavy metal song, too, which is especially impressive, given that it features hardly any guitars. But it was the kind of song I listened to and forgot about, early on. It wasn’t talking about money being like God, or God being dead, or people fucking like animals—my particular lyrical interests in those early days—so I wasn’t paying nearly as much attention to it as I should have been.

Then, in 1997, years after I’d first heard this song (which was first released in 1989), I went ahead and gave someone my “purity”. And two days later, with my stolen purity in tow, she dumped me. All of a sudden, “Sin” held a lot more meaning than it ever had before.

The anger present in both the lyrics and the instrumentation—if anyone has ever played an angry keyboard, it’s Mister Michael Trent Reznor—is a bit scary at times, especially given Trent’s demand, at the end of the chorus, that the “you” of the song “take in the extent of [Trent’s] sin”. This could be seen as a sort of “revenge rape” song, if looked at in a certain way. But I don’t think the narrator would seriously harm the person he’s singing to. I think it’s an empty threat, albeit a harsh one. And I think the threat of violence is a sin to be forgiven here, especially if we consider the pain of lost purity.

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Beautiful iTunes Ad Featuring Coldplay

I happen to be of the opinion that the advertising campaigns Apple has used to promote iPod and iTunes are genius. And lately they’ve been taking the classic silhouette concept and evolving it by leaps and bounds. The latest ad, which features the band Coldplay, also happens to thematically resemble the packaging and advertising campaign used to promote the release of Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. The Unofficial Apple Weblog calls this theme space-esqe, and I suppose that’s a pretty accurate description, but I’ll just stick to calling it beautiful.

And kudos to Apple and their advertising agency for subtly trying to influence potential switchers even in ads for their platform-agnostic products.

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Listen to NIN Remixes Via a Podcast

remix.nin.com is an active community of Nine Inch Nails fans remixing the work of Mister Michael Trent Reznor and his cohorts (NIN has released remixable multi-track files of their last couple of records for free). But, like so many things on the Internet, it’s the sort of thing that’s so huge now that there’s really no easy way “into” it, if you get my meaning.

Enter the remix.nin.com - Highest Rated Today Podcast (iTunes link). It doesn’t appear to be updated daily, which is disappointing, but it definitely looks like an easy way into the whole remix.nin.com experience.

Thanks to The NIN Hotline for pointing the way.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Every Day Is Exactly The Same

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 8, 2007.

i believe i can see the future
because i repeat the same routine
i think i used to have a purpose
and then again that might have been a dream

“Every Day Is Exactly The Same” was the #1 song on the Billboard Modern Rock chart on the day that my daughter was born. When Kaylee asks what the #1 song was on the day she was born, which is bound to happen in our family, where discussions of such minutiae are commonplace, I will certainly not tell her that it was Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” (#1 on the Hot 100 that day), or James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” (#1 on the Top 40). No, I will definitely say that it was Nine Inch Nails. But talking about this song is always kind of awkward, because it’s a song that, from my perspective, is all about how meaningless life becomes when you settle down, or when you settle period (into a job, into a routine, et cetera). So I’ll tell her, and then I’ll ask her to pass the brocolli, hoping that we can not talk about what the song meant to me.

I’ve told many friends that With Teeth is not an album meant for the married with children subset of the NIN fanbase. Between “EDIETS” and “Right Where It Belongs” alone there is enough fodder to get the sad, insecure brain thinking very dark thoughts. And my brain is often sad, and almost always insecure.

i can feel their eyes are watching
in case i lose myself again
sometimes i think i’m happy here
sometimes i still pretend
i can’t remember how this all got started
but i can tell you - exactly - how it will end

Listen: It’s hard to listen to With Teeth all of the way through for a number of reasons. The most prominent of these is that it is an album of single songs, and not the kind of concept album (The Downward Spiral) or pseudo-concept album (The Fragile) that we’d become used to prior to its release. There are groups of two or three songs here and there which can be listened to back-to-back, but there’s always a filler song there to interrupt the flow ("The Collector” and “Sunspots” are the tracks that come immediately to mind). But the biggest reason that it’s hard for me to listen to it is because it seems to be suggesting to me that I am no longer meant to be listening to this, that I am too old, that I am too normal, that I have become the man, as it were, by becoming a husband and a parent, and that, therefore, I cannot understand (maybe the Fresh Prince was right about that one).

And that hurts, because this is my favorite band bar-none. And the idea that I am no longer fit to be part of the audience… that’s too much to bear.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: That’s What I Get

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 6, 2007.

The lyrics of “That’s What I Get,” from Pretty Hate Machine, are a melodramatic, masochistic man-boy’s dream come true. How many times did I blast this track in my dorm room at Bradford, after some unrequited crush had turned me down? How many times did I croon along with Mister Reznor as he sang the bridge?

Why’s it come as a surprise
to think that I was so naive?
Maybe didn’t mean that much.
But it meant everything to me.

How many times? Quite a few, my friends. Quite a few.

To say that “That’s What I Get” became my anthem during the first two and a half years of my college experience would be an understatement. Still, to this day, I feel as a certain pull to that very simple, very direct one-line chorus.

That’s what I get!

Since high school, since a friend dragged me to auditions for a school play that weren’t really auditions at all (everyone who tried out got a part) and thereby got me hooked on the idea of performance, I have never really listened to songs in the way that I think you’re supposed to. A lot of my fellow oeuvreblogging comrades get into lyrical and musical analysis in their posts, and you can tell that they’ve really listened to the songs they’re writing about. Me, because I like to sing along to nearly everything I hear, I’m always more concerned with, “How does this lyric apply to my own life, to my own experience?” And, “How can I craft a convincing performance out of this, even if it’s for an audience of one (myself)?”

When I became obsessed with “That’s What I Get” in college, the tune summed up the recent years of my life very well. I sang with images of my first “serious” relationship in my mind:

Just when everything was making sense,
you took away all my self-confidence.
Now all that I’ve been hearing must be true.
I guess I’m not the only boy for you.

How perfectly did that sum up my first romantic experience? Well, I felt as if I had penned those lyrics myself, to be honest with you. And that’s why the song meant so much to me.

The second verse was even better. It was like a page torn straight out of the paper journal I was keeping at the time.

How could you turn me into this?
After you just taught me how to kiss...you.
I told you I’d never say goodbye.
Now I’m slipping on the tears you made me cry.

She had not only taught me how to kiss her; she had taught me how to kiss, period. She was my first kiss, and I probably did tell her that I’d never say goodbye (that’s what melodramatic high school kids do, right?). And then, within a week or two of saying that, “Yes,” she would be my girlfriend, and that “Yes,” she would go to the prom with me, she was off with some other guy.

I am a pop bubblegum whore, like most of the music listening public. I like songs that I can identify with, and that I can sing along with in my car, whether I have the voice to sing them or not. And “That’s What I Get” fits the bill about as perfectly as any song ever has.

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