NIN Oeuvre Blog: Happiness in Slavery (Woodstock)

There are two recordings of the Woodstock version of “Happiness in Slavery” in my iTunes library. The first comes from a bootleg (When the Whip Comes Down) that I purchased at the old Rockit Records in Nashua, New Hampshire. As near as I can tell, it’s a straight-up rip of the audio broadcast via pay-per-view on the day the concert actually happened. The second comes from the official Woodstock 94 CD, and it’s that polished-up version that won the 1996 Grammy for Best Heavy Metal Performance. But what I’m here to tell you is that, if you’re interested in an authentic souvenir of the NIN sound of that period, the bootleg is the far better way to go.

Ever since I brought the two-disc Woodstock 94 compilation home from Newbury Comics back in the day, I’ve been bothered by how sanitized its version of “Slavery” is. Maybe Trent had control over it, or maybe he didn’t. But whoever had control ripped out the essence of what made that performance great.

What really makes the Woodstock 94 version so astounding to listen to is that, in its purest form, it is the most perfect sonic embodiment of the Self-Destruct Tour aesthetic available. Nothing on the live portion of Closure even comes close, at least to my ears. What you have in the middle section of the Woodstock version of “Slavery” (at least on the bootleg recording of it) is a song falling apart. The keyboards are failing, covered now, at the end of the concert, with the mud the band had caked themselves in prior to arriving on stage. The sounds issuing forth from them are less music than noise. You can hear the frustration as each keyboardist tries his damnedest to rip an actual note out of the things. And yet, all of this confusion, all of this insanity—it actually works. There is still a rhythm to the chaos, and that gets us as listeners through to the other side. The breakdown becomes an actual breakdown, but the band manages to put itself back together and finish out the show. They smash keyboards into stage walls, throw them onto the stage floor, and then they focus their energies into making the guitars do the heavy-lifting for the last few songs. It’s a mess, but it’s magical.

In an interview conducted some time later—I think this is available on Closure, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so I’m not sure—Trent talks about his conflicting reactions to the show. When they first came off stage, he thought that the Woodstock 94 performance had been one of their best ever. He had felt a real connection with the crowd, something he hadn’t thought would be possible, given the size of the venue. But later, when he listened back to the recording, he decided that it was horrible, the band at its musical worst.

In case this post didn’t clue you in, I believe that initial instinctual reaction was the more valid one. The Woodstock 94 performance as a whole was what hooked me on Nine Inch Nails. A band that could teeter so close to utter disaster and yet pull itself back from the abyss just in time? That was the band for me. Still is. Probably always will be. I felt the connection that night, even from the safety of my living room couch, hundreds of miles away. And I feel it still.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Leaving Hope

A 2005 Q&A with Rolling Stone establishes that Trent Reznor got off of drugs and alcohol in late 2001, just as the live album And All That Could Have Been and its companion disc, Still, were about to be released. AATCHB and Still are therefore our best windows into the world of Mr. Reznor as he transitions out of the chaotic milieu of the 1990s and into the creatively ripe era of the new millennium. And it’s my contention that the final song on Still, “Leaving Hope,” is a perfectly positioned bridge from one era to the next.

It was in the hopeful yet haunting soundscapes of “Leaving Hope” that I took refuge from the world of musical shit that the rest of humanity was wading through in the years between Nine Inch Nails releases. From January 2002, when Still first entered my consciousness, to April 2005, when With Teeth arrived, songs like “Leaving Hope” were what gave me, well, hope.

I think I always knew that the return of Nine Inch Nails would be more headbang-worthy than daydream-appropriate, but even the arrival of With Teeth and Year Zero, with their relative dearth of instrumentals, didn’t diminish my hope for another group of songs that, like Still, would encourage stillness in the maelstrom of my turbulent brain. “Leaving Hope” was like a final exam written for a course that had begun with assignments like “A Warm Place,” and it proved, to me at least, that the man behind this music was never going to abandon a musical form that he had worked so hard to get good at.

“Leaving Hope,” in my opinion, predicted the arrival of Ghosts I-IV, half a decade before its arrival. It is a remarkably narrative song, for an instrumental. Perhaps it is because I will always tie the music of Still to the videos that were released to the Internet to accompany it, but I can’t help but listen to “Leaving Hope” and see Trent sitting at a piano in New Orleans, candles flickering, curtains quivering in the breeze. When I listen to “Leaving Hope,” I hear the gentle sound of rain falling just outside the window, even though it isn’t there, and I hear a thunderclap at the end, like punctuation, telling me to move on. I feel suddenly at one with a man who seems to be making a decision, who seems to be finally making up his mind to stop hoping for better days and to start actively seeking them out.

That’s what “Leaving Hope” means to me. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help but feel compelled to get off of my ass, once the stillness is over, and to try and step out from underneath the rain cloud I’ve been palling around with for so long.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: The Becoming

The clowns over at SongMeanings.net can debate all they want about who the Annie mentioned in “The Becoming” is, but I know the truth. She’s not Tori Amos, regardless of whether or not LittleUrantiaGirl is right about Annie being Ms. Amos’s childhood nickname. She’s not an ex-girlfriend of Trent’s, Ana99. And she’s certainly not a character from the work of Jean Paul Sartre, mr.anthrope. No, the Annie that Trent Reznor sings about in “The Becoming” is another Annie entirely.

She’s the Annie from Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”

Yes, you heard me right. The proof is in the pudding. Or, well, the lyrics, at least.

I can try to get away but I’ve strapped myself in
I can try to scratch away the sound in my ears
I can see it killing away all my bad parts
I don’t want to listen but it’s all too clear
Hiding backwards inside of me I feel so unafraid
Annie, hold a little tighter…
I might just slip away
— Nine Inch Nails

Annie, are you OK?
So, Annie are you OK?
Are you OK, Annie?
You’ve been hit by
(You’ve been struck by)
A Smooth Criminal
— Michael Jackson

Don’t you see it? The protagonist in the Nine Inch Nails song is very obviously the eponymous “Smooth Criminal” of the Michael Jackson track. He comes in through the window of the girl he once prayed would save him, would hold him a little tighter. The scene is like a crescendo, a rising argument between two former lovers. And when she refuses to hold the pieces of him together, when she refuses to rescue him from the noise inside his head, the noise that wants him dead, he beats her. He comes into her apartment, and he leaves her bloodstains on the carpet.

It’s really simple, and it’s all right there for the interested listener to pick up on. If you can’t hear it… well, I feel sorry for you. You are missing out on one of the truly great lyrical crossovers in pop music history.

So, until next time, when we discuss whether or not the window that the smooth criminal came in through was the bathroom window, and what the implications of that might be, this is ChrisClark (ecc1977 on Twitter) signing off. Good night, and good luck.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Capital G

The drumbeat at the beginning of the Nine Inch Nails song “Capital G” is almost identical to the drumbeat at the beginning of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Don’t believe me? Listen to the beginning of “Capital G,” looping the beat if you can find some way to do so, and sing these words over it:

Hey, pretty baby, with the high heels on
You give me fever like I’ve never ever known
You’re just a product of loveliness
I like the groove of your walk, your talk, your dress.

Okay, take a minute to laugh, and then let’s get back to business.

You good? Good. Let’s move on.

“Capital G” is perhaps the most blatantly political song Trent Reznor has ever written, and it appears on what is most certainly the most politically-charged album that Nine Inch Nails has ever released (Year Zero). From the opening salvo ("I pushed a button and elected him to office and / he pushed the button and he dropped the bomb") to the line where Reznor’s character alludes to his lack of concern about global warming by saying that he “[d]on’t give a shit about the temperature in Guatemala,” the listener is bombarded with images of a bleak future where even those of us who used to stand for something are now to be found on our hands and knees. But I’d argue that it’s the music that makes the song here, in particular the voice/accent that Reznor adopts in the verses.

The narrator’s tone in the verses is hard to pin down (as is the quasi-accent that’s being employed). He’s amused by the future he has helped wrought, certainly, but he also seems rather disinterested, not just in the temperature of Guatemala, but in everything. He seems like the sort of person who is only involved in the world when all it takes is a button click to be involved. In this way, the song seems as if it is not just an assault on the authority figure who signs his name with a capital G, but also on the lazy masses. Their/our refusal to think, and their/our refusal to become more personally involved in the world makes them/us just as culpable as good old George (and good old God). In fact, the song might be even more of an assault on those of us who were stupid enough to push that button and elect this guy to office than it is an assault on the idiot himself.

I think there are some who would rather Trent Reznor (and musicians and entertainers, in general) stay away from politics, but me, I don’t mind. As long as he sets his political statements to music that I can dance around like an idiot to, I’m fine with it.

Oh, and if you’re like me and you’re wondering if there are any other strange connections between Trent Reznor and Michael Jackson, come back next Tuesday for my look at “The Becoming.” How’s that for a tease?

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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.

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