Nine Inch Nails

In the early ‘80s, groups like Kraftwerk and Ultravox and Depeche Mode and OMD and Gary Numan started combining blatantly synthetic, electronic music textures with rock and disco beats to usher in a new wave of popular music. Before that, synthesizers tended to be used in a supporting role to mimic existing sounds like strings or flutes, as novelty sound effects in a more traditional rock and roll idiom, or, when they were used on their own, as ethereal, spacey, sonic soundscapes with little or no rhythmic urgency. There were a couple of notable exceptions in the disco world (Donna Summer’s I Feel Love comes to mind), but for the most part, the energy of rock and dance and the sonic possibilities of purely synthetic electronics were kept apart until the ‘80s.

In 1989, Trent Reznor combined harsh keyboard-based electronic sounds with the aggressive energy of heavy metal into a potent stew and called it Nine Inch Nails. I don’t specifically know to what the name refers, but I always think that a nine inch nail is about what you’d need to crucify someone effectively. Reznor’s exhilarating blend of electronic sound and emotional fury slightly predates grunge, and is a lot “cleaner” by not relying primarily on extremely distorted electric guitar, but it captures the same rage that was to boil out of Seattle and wash over the country a couple of years later. His head-banging beats, searing squeals of sizzling circuits, and rude lyrics (“the devil’s going to fuck me in the back of his car”), add up to some of the most satisfyingly nasty music I know. He certainly wasn’t the first to combine electronics and rage, nor was he necessarily the best, but for some reason, this album caught the spirit of the times and became surprisingly popular.

I was completely lost in New York City. I had tried to break into the film or television community there with absolutely no luck. I had finally quit my comfortable but dead-end job making photostats and had been reduced to working as an office temp – the bottom rung of a ladder I swore I’d never try to scale. I’d sold out to the lowest bidder and had to wear a suit to perform mind-bendingly boring jobs for idiots I neither liked nor respected in companies I loathed. I was, in a word, miserable. And that’s why I liked Nine Inch Nails so much. I used to take train, a ferry, and a bus to get to the New Jersey offices of Payne Webber in order to sit in my veal-fattening half-cubicle (not even the pretense of privacy), data-entrying meaningless symbols into a computer terminal until I’d weep with tedium. When lunch finally came, I would wolf down some tasteless sandwich from the cafeteria and run outside, turn my walkman up to 11, and soothe my fevered soul with the ravaged screaming of Nine Inch Nails.

Powerful music to give the powerless the illusion of resistance and strength.

And if I wasn’t in such a frustrating place in my life, I probably would’ve hated it, just as I never would’ve liked Ministry or Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel if I hadn’t heard them when I did. It’s all about timing. Reznor came out with several albums after the great initial jolt of Pretty Hate Machine, but either the novelty had worn off or (more likely) I was in a happier place, because they just didn’t appeal to me as much. But whenever my head implodes from anger and frustration, this is the album I’m likely to reach for to fill it back up again.