Archives by Tag: Nine Inch Nails
Worth Your Consideration 003 - A GF5 Linkdump
- The latest Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, which is available as a free download will also now be available as a physical CD. However, The NIN Hotline reports that only 200,000 copies will be released in the United States. The physical release will include, among other things, “a DVD of NIN performing live tracks from The Slip at rehearsals,” and I am ready to beat down anybody who stands in the way of me getting a copy.
- William Katt, the star of the most awesome television program of all-time, The Greatest American Hero, will be guest-starring on NBC’s Heroes next season. Newsarama reports that Katt will play a “really, really wonderful, seedy, smarmy-mouthed reporter.” Me, I haven’t seen any of the second season of Heroes, but I’m definitely going to have to catch up, now that I know about this upcoming guest appearance.
Topics: Nine Inch Nails, Geekforce Reserves
NIN Oeuvre Blog: Only
Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 26, 2007.
It was at some point during the summer of 2005 that I asked my brother, the man responsible for introducing me to Nine Inch Nails in the first place, what he thought of the band’s new single, “Only.”
“It sounds like gay disco,” he told me.*
And you know what? He was right. I’ve come to think of it as something more like a gay square dance myself—try singing “Now bow to your partner! Now, do-si-do!” over the intro, and you’ll see what I mean—but the simple fact is that I agree with my brother. There’s something queer about “Only”. Where my brother and I part ways on this matter is in the fact that I see gay disco/square dance as a viable musical genre, and he does not.
“Only” is certainly the closest to a straight new-wave/dance song that Trent’s gotten since Pretty Hate Machine, and I, for one, welcomed the return when I first heard it. From the callback to “Down In It”—so that’s what happened after the tiniest little dot caught his eye—to the shouted chorus (which I imagined turning into two different narrative voices—Person A: “There is no you” and Person B: “There is only me”—in a remix I was envisioning after Trent released the GarageBand file to the song), there isn’t much I don’t like about “Only”. As I’ve stated before, I am huge fan of PHM-era NIN. But therein lies the problem with “Only.” I think this is a song that would be more at home on PHM than it is on the somewhat disjointed (although mostly satisfying) With Teeth.
Listen: I think my brother’s opinion of “Only” (and of “The Hand That Feeds,” which we wasn’t fond of either) is well-founded. There was something jarring about “THTF” and “Only” leading the charge for the new NIN after two albums worth of more sonically layered and lyrically deeper songs (The Downward Spiral and The Fragile). I think that, eventually, in looking back on the NIN catalog, “THTF” and “Only” may be viewed with same sense of scorn with which fans like my NIN-ouevreblogging colleague at This Machine is Obsolete view “Sanctified.” I can see a day when Trent refuses to play either track live—he’s certainly got enough other songs to play by this point—just as he appears to be patently against playing “Sanctified.” But I think that’ll be a shame, because both songs are good songs. They’re just songs out of time, and out of place.
* My brother had gay friends in high school, when that simply was not cool, and several of my best friends in college were gay. So please don’t get on me about this being a homophobic post. As Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire might say, if keeping a client depended on it, “I love gay people!” And that means I’m allowed to call things “gay.” Seriously. Go call PETA, and ask them. They’ll tell you so.
Or is that GLAAD you’re supposed to call? Damn, dude. I’m such a homo for not remembering.
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.
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.
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.
