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Nine Inch Nails recently toured with The Jesus and Mary Chain, whose 1985 debut Psychocandy was a sort of stripped-down template for the kind of fucked-up pop delivery system Reznor created here. Then again, when you strip it all down, The Downward Spiral is still a pop album.
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And, of course, they did so while making the kinds of noises that most bands hand even figured out how to make, let alone innovate on their own.
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Trent Reznor tapped into the same kind of disaffection and detachment that Nirvana did, but with the tables turned slightly, embracing a more sexualized kind of aggression and social commentary examining structures of power and control. Certainly the ’90s were a strange time for music, and so-called “alternative rock” was highly marketable, but in the wake of Nirvana everybody was getting a major label contract-so many that, in hindsight, it seems fairly obvious only a handful of them would actually prove to be commercially successful. The album sold more than three million copies and counting- nobody sells that many records anymore, and definitely not bands who weaponized samplers like Nine Inch Nails did. The level of success that Nine Inch Nails achieved with The Downward Spiral, however, is far greater than likely anybody thought possible from an artist inspired by noise-crafting performance artists such as Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten. But my first tastes of it only reinforced how exciting it was at the time, first the leadoff single “March of the Pigs,” a thoroughly weird three-minute feast of destruction in 7/8 time that culminates in a major key piano chorus of all things, and second “Reptile,” as heard on a KROQ pre-release preview of the album, which sounded like a symphony of evil robots. When I was 11 my parents expressed their reservations about me hearing the band’s Broken EP suffice it to say I waited for a cooling-off period (and taping tracks off my brother’s copy) before finally picking up The Downward Spiral. And though the band’s sophomore effort The Downward Spiral was a massive success, it made people nervous. Anyone who’s ever ridden a motorcycle in a leather jacket can tell you just how appealing that can be, but Nine Inch Nails pushed limits in a way that no other band of their time did. Nine Inch Nails in 1994 were, from the outside, a dangerous band. “But there we were, and there it was, and girls were taking their clothes off to it.” “To my horror, to my absolute horror, I realized the DJ was playing ‘Hurt’ …a song based on the most personal sentiments, the deepest emotions I have ever had: ‘ I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel.’” Reznor said in Jonathan Gold’s 1994 Rolling Stone profile of the band. Not much really horrified Reznor himself, other than hearing a soul-baring ballad he wrote succumb to the crass, banal fate of becoming background music in a strip club. There wasn’t much of a limit to the lengths Nine Inch Nails would go to obliterate polite, conservative American social conventions. That, of course, was on an album recorded in the house where the Manson Family murdered actress Sharon Tate (for which Reznor has since expressed regrets). And by 1994, he turned the direct, vulgar and highly radio-unfriendly phrase “ I want to fuck you like an animal” into one of the year’s biggest choruses. In 1992, Reznor collaborated with Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson to make a longform music video meant to give the appearance of a snuff film, which was never officially released but its outtakes-the human waste-disposal maze of “Pinion,” the performance art torture of “Happiness in Slavery”-were still the stuff of nightmares. Only at the end of Nine Inch Nails shows, the band’s instruments suffered fatalities instead of the star.
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Nine Inch Nails’ performances were orgies of fishnet-clad, mudcaked violence, not far removed from the villainous rock ‘n’ roll vaudeville of Alice Cooper-one of Reznor’s own influences. In the mid-’90s, nobody did provocation like Trent Reznor did.