Archives by Tag: Oeuvre Blog
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.
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.
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?
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.
