Archives by Topic: Nine Inch Nails
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.
Topics: Nine Inch Nails
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.
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.”
Topics: Nine Inch Nails
New Nine Inch Nails for FREE
It’s been two weeks since Trent Reznor posted his latest ‘Two weeks’ message, and Nine Inch Nails has delivered the goods yet again. The Slip is the second Nine Inch Nails record of 2008, and this one is a completely free download. I actually had my credit card ready to go as soon as I saw the link this morning, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that we’d be getting this puppy for absolutely nothing. I know what I’m listening to on the bus ride into Boston this morning.
NIN Oeuvre Blog: Last
Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 1, 2007.
“Last,” the third song on the Broken EP, was my first “favorite” NIN song. I can’t remember what order I bought the albums in, but I want to say that I had a copy of TDS first, and then PHM, and then, finally, Broken. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until I got heavily into Broken that one song emerged from the fray as a “favorite”. Before then, every song was on equal footing with me. But “Last” changed all that.
Maybe it’s the lyrics that did it for me. To this day, the images that Trent paints in “Last” are some of the ones that stick out most strongly in my mind. “Fresh blood through tired skin,” conjures an image of sickly, paper-thin flesh in my mind, and of the strange and somewhat grotesque sight of a vein pumping beneath it. “My lips may promise, but my heart is a whore.” Well, that line comes up in my brain so often that I long ago decided, if ever I was to do a follow-up to what was arguably my most successful song under the moniker of Pop Bubblegum Trash, a ditty entitled “Little Fascist Panties” (after a Tori Amos lyric, yes), then it would be called “My Lips May Promise,” or else, “My Heart Is A Whore.”
And, of course, the name of this site comes from “Last,” too. “Look through these tired eyes. You’ll see ten thousand lies.”
I was listening to a Pandora Podcast on song lyrics just last night, on the way home from work, and they got into a discussion about the power of repetition in popular music. They made the point that, while repetition doesn’t really work in poetry, it can do wonders for a song. I believe the song they used to illustrate the point was something by the Kinks, but I think there are quite a few NIN songs that could be given as examples, too. And “Last” is certainly one of them.
Consider the power of the word “come” in this song, the repeated invitation it offers. The music of Nine Inch Nails is nothing if not participatory. Trent invites the audience to “step right up,” in “March of the Pigs,” and here, in “Last,” he pleads with us to “come, come, come on.” And if we are at all hesitant, the driving guitar line is right there to give us a firm nudge.
Every song on Broken is amazing in my mind, from the opening crunches of “Pinion” to the hidden gems “Suck” and “Physical”. But the anger that’s oozing out of every corner of this EP is most palpable on “Last”. The Woodstock ‘94 version of “Happiness in Slavery” won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1996 but, in my opinion, “Last” is the most metal song Trent Reznor’s ever written.
