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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