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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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Happiness in Slavery (Fixed)

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 4, 2007.

I got into an argument with a friend once (online, I think, but I can’t find it) about what the absolute worst NIN release was. My answer was Further Down The Spiral, an answer I still stick by. Her answer, which shocked me, was Fixed. I got the impression, during our discussion, that Fixed was universally despised in some corners of the NIN fanbase, and I just couldn’t understand why. In my opinion, Fixed is the most complete of all of the Nine Inch Nails remix records. And the remix of “Happiness in Slavery” by Trent Reznor, Chris Vrenna, and P.K. that appears on the record is a big part of that.

Where else in the NIN catalog, except for fellow Fixed track “Screaming Slave”, do we get to experience a man’s tortured screams used as the focal point of a song? Where else in any band’s catalog, for that matter? Reznor, Vrenna, and P.K. create a fairly intense dance song with samples taken from a tune that would go on to win a Grammy for Best Metal Performance, and then insert into that track the repeated melody of a performance artist Bob Flanagan screaming, “Ahhhh, ahh-ahh. Oh-oh.” and that’s not considered one of the most amazing compositions in the catalog? How is this so?

What has always appealed to me about Nine Inch Nails is the way that Trent Reznor’s previous experience in New Wave bands like Option 30 comes out in nearly every track, regardless of how hard-edged it is. Where many of the bands who became popular with my classmates in the 1990s trace their roots back to the guitar-centric music of the 1960s and 70s, the music of Nine Inch Nails has, as it’s closest ancestor, the synthesizer-centric music of the 1980s. And I think there are some younger NIN fans who forget that, who enjoy the band in spite of that, instead of in appreciation of that. There are some younger fans who shun Pretty Hate Machine and it’s more danceable sensibility. And these are the same folks, I think, who might consider Fixed to be a sub-par record.

I think they’re missing out, but maybe that’s just me.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: March of the Pigs

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 3, 2007.

There is something missing from the studio version of “March of the Pigs”. Having heard so many live renditions of it, I am always saddened to remember, upon listening to the original studio version, that there is no instrumental outro after the second “Now doesn’t that make you feel better?”. In every live version I’ve ever heard, there is this amazing outro that comes in just after the final piano notes fade away, an outro featuring all the musical explosiveness of the verses, along with the single, repeated lyric, “All the pigs are all lined up.” And though I love the studio version very much, I can’t help but wonder how much more amazing it would be if that last bit were included.

I remember the first time I heard that outro live*. During my first NIN show, in January of 1995 (also my first concert ever), they launched into “Pigs” pretty early on. It was the second or third song in the set, I believe. And it was right around then that the crowds to the right of us, who were rushing the floor in an attempt to get past security by sheer force and join that sea of a mosh-pit below, ended up breaking the metal staircase. The railings on one or both sides buckled (I can’t remember if it was both), trapping two rather thin friends on the bottom (they both made it out, eventually). Trent was goading the crowd to “Step right up,” to march, and to push, and that’s what they were doing. And then, with the staircase now blocked by a groaning mass of aching humanity, they were jumping over our heads (we were seated in the level just above the floor, but it was at least a ten-foot drop). The railing in front of us became unstable, and security moved us back a few rows while they fixed it. “Pigs” segged into something else, and eventually we got back to our seats.

In “Last" post, I wrote that the music of Nine Inch Nails is nothing if not participatory. “March of the Pigs” is the perfect example of that, and no NIN song before or since comes as close to making the audience feel as if they are a vital part of the song than this one. And that’s the other thing that’s missing from the studio version of this song: listening to it by yourself, be it on a car stereo, on your home stereo, or on some portable music device—that experience is never going to come close to the experience you’ll have when hearing it live.

*I’m not counting the time I heard it live during the broadcast of Woodstock ‘94, because that’s not really live now, is it? It was live for the people there, but I was just watching it on TV. Anyway, that aside, I will admit that I love the ad-lib in the final line before the outro: “Now all of you miserable, muddy fuckheads are alright.”

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