Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3)

by Carr, Daphne

  I’ve heard that “Something I Can Never Have” is about cocaine or crack.62 It’s not about drugs for me; it’s girls, because that was a problem. That song was the first of the slow, agonizing, and precisely written NIN songs. “That’s What I Get” is a good song about women. “Maybe it didn’t mean that much, but it meant everything to me” is the epitome of sensitivity that’s been stepped on. The way the song goes quiet after that is great; it adds to the time you can reflect on the lyrics.

  I just read Heart of Darkness a couple of months ago, and it got me to doubt things like the whole idea of efficiency. Is our goal so noble and perfect? Trent’s become a lot more cultural than I’ve ever seen him, especially when he’s talking about New Orleans. When he spoke about Katrina, I rolled my eyes. But I watched that documentary from Spike Lee that Trent told everybody to watch, and it made sense. I never really thought about it, but that could’ve been me down there. Or what if something happened up here, and the government didn’t respond? Before, Trent seemed to really hate people. He’s made so much sense to me that for him to do something irrational, it’d be like me doing something against my own principles. I’ve matured and maybe he’s matured, or he’s given up that chronic dissatisfaction and moved on. I didn’t follow politics until I joined The Spiral. People post articles on why fans should be aware about things. Those guys make a lot of sense sometimes.

  I’ve always had this way of thinking … that I don’t want to be intimidated by intelligent women. On PHM, Trent talks in a way that seems like he feels inferior and that women are dominating, especially with the lyric, “As she walked me through the nicest parts of hell.” A woman is being a torment. Trent views them as a necessity, but he doesn’t really want them. Like in “Kinda I Want To”: “There’s a devil sleeping in my bed.” On “Reptile,” “Eraser,” “Big Man With a Gun,” “Closer”—these are all songs where he doesn’t talk about women as being something enjoyable. Songs like “The Fragile” show a more tender side, as he’s found some person who’s likable, but I can totally relate to what he says about them otherwise.

  I was misogynistic for a long time. I remember trying to write an essay on it, trying to describe why I hated women, trying to be real reasonable and sensitive about it. By the end, I thought, This has a lot of holes in it, and it’s prejudiced, blind, and irrational, so that’s why I’ve kind of come off it. Now I see it’s my fault that they don’t talk to me or I don’t talk to them. It’s fear. Like, I’d be reading at school near an interior-design room. The things I’d overhear from there from the girls were enough to make me never want to talk to another girl again. They’re ripping down people when they’re not there. That’s been a huge fear of mine, and a reason for my perfectionism.

  When I joined The Spiral, that was my biggest moment of fandom, because I had all the albums, I collected everything, I had just seen Trent in Erie. I started a thread, and it just took off from there. So many people were like me. Well, actually, they weren’t like me. They appeared to like the loudness, like on Broken. But I felt attracted to these people. They were fun and extroverted. I like the soft stuff. “Leaving Hope” is my favorite song. Trent’s a lot angrier than I am, I guess. “You Know What You Are” and “The Hand That Feeds” are really seething songs. I can be pissed off sometimes and relate to that mood, but now I’m calm, so I’m thinking about “A Warm Place.”

  During a recent Spiral chat with Trent and the band, I was asking too personal of questions, and Trent didn’t reply. But the other band members were making assholes out of themselves. It was a side of NIN I didn’t know existed. I mean, I hated Blink-182. All my friends were into them, and it drove me insane, because they weren’t sensitive, thinking, mature people. With NIN, it’s like the other end of the spectrum. But when I saw NIN act like Blink-182, it was like, What the hell?

  The music’s an invariable thing, but the band members … I never liked the band members. All I cared about was Trent. Same with Joy Division; all I cared about was Ian Curtis. New Order, not really. They’re nowhere near Joy Division, in terms of postmodern musicians with incredible lyrics. I don’t think Trent is postmodern, to tell you the truth. He’s not a poet, unfortunately. He has really basic lyrics. His most poetic song is “Somewhat Damaged,” because he goes off from how he normally writes. It’s rich with visuals and doesn’t really have any refrains. He generally has too many refrains; he’s becoming more pop. He doesn’t have too much room for a listener’s subjectivity in his art. It’s probably in his personality. He seems like a perfectionist, a control freak.

  With Teeth sounds like PHM Part IV, because the lyrics seem shallow. I get the feeling that Trent’s doing all this just to fund his retirement. But it’s not a product; it’s his art. He hasn’t been like, I guess I’m going to make another TDS to bring back all the people who were fans of that album.

  With the fan club, it’s like, Let’s spend money to talk about how awesome T is. People talk about him on the boards like, Trent, you’re God. I’m not like that. I only want to meet people who are like me. It’s something that’s human, to want to find someone who thinks like yourself. But I do feel genuine with my membership. Sometimes I wish I had spent all the money that I did on NIN stuff on art supplies for myself.

  In my room, I have NIN over here, I have my PC games right here, and Clive Barker stuff there. It is like an altar. Sometimes I need to shut off all the stimulation around me and just focus on the music, like “Leaving Hope.” I’ve listened to that song so many times. Like on Friday nights: I’d get really depressed, and I’d throw on the slower songs and lose myself in that. I refuse to go on antidepressants now, because it destroys my creativity. Before, when I was on antidepressants and listening to music, I couldn’t feel that parallel toward it. When I wasn’t depressed, I didn’t know what to do; I was just sitting there and the music wasn’t making any sense.

  I’ve found a lot of safety in music. I talk about NIN being a self-fulfilling prophecy … now I listen to NIN out of habit more than for understanding and coping. Sometimes I think, Why would I listen to NIN when I’m in a pretty good mood right now?

  The Only Time

  Anonymous, 35, between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio

  This fan published an eloquent, personal review of the 2006 Blossom NIN concert, and I reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to share even more of his history with the band. We met at a coffee shop in Akron, which helped locate us in space as he pointed to bars in his past, his work up in Cleveland, and his hometown south of Akron.

  I grew up in a little town called Uniontown. Literally, it had one stoplight. It combined with the next town over for high school, and we had 300 kids in my graduating class, in 1989. It’s an Amish community. My wife grew up in Richfield, and her frame of reference was Akron. Like when they would go to a mall, it was Akron’s Summit Mall, whereas my frame of reference was North Canton. That’s where people’s parents worked, at places like Diebold and the Hoover Co.

  Cleveland is your backyard when you live in northeastern Ohio. It was an intimidating place. It didn’t seem safe, you know? It was the eighties, and it was a big city dying. There was no reason to go there. It wasn’t like that was where the department stores were for the holidays, like in previous generations.

  I’ve worked in downtown Cleveland for seven years, and many of my coworkers make the commute like I do, about 40 minutes. Tax- and school-district wise, it is better here. After five years, I started looking for something closer to home. I looked for a good three or four months, and I had offers, but nobody could touch what Cleveland pays.

  Growing up, I was always listening to Top 40 stuff. Whatever my older sister was listening to, that was fine. My good friend had older brothers who liked The Who and Oingo Boingo, so I started listening to that, went through the hair band/heavy metal phase in middle school, then found the alternative scene. It was then that I found my voice as a writer, and I immersed myself in the music and lifestyle of mid to late eighties a
lternative. I was into things like The Cure, Depeche Mode, those morose songs and albums like The The’s Mind Bomb. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that album, I was like, Damn, I wrote this! There was such a connection with the things Matt Johnson was singing about: very sexual and violent and messed-up.

  I was listening to PHM today on the drive home. I almost wish the album had never been released. The first time I heard a NIN song on the radio, I was just like, Fuck! Other people are going to hear this and they’re gonna claim it as their own. I have to go to this dive bar in Akron to hear this music. Why am I hearing it on the radio? PHM was so personal to me, and it felt cheapened because it was reap-propriated for frat boys. I remember thinking the same thing when I saw “Everybody Hurts” on MTV.

  I worked at this place called the Warehouse Club, and that’s where I began to scratch below the surface. I had this expanding circle of friends from the next town over. My school friends were a motley bunch. They never batted an eye when I showed up with dyed hair, a shaved head. I was the whole “tortured artist” finding my voice in writing. I hated high school and was always going to leave and never come back.

  There was a little punk bar called Thursday’s. Everybody in the Akron punk scene went there. You saw other people dressed in black, wearing eyeliner, with the leather jacket. You knew there was a kinship of some kind there. I don’t think I was so much adopting Trent’s style, because by then I had been in that scene for a little bit. He was more a validation of it.

  My parents are devoted Catholics. When I was about 16, they gave me the option to be confirmed, and I said no. My parents weren’t too happy about that, but they respected my opinion. Now I have been confirmed, and my wife converted to Catholicism, and my son is being raised Catholic. There is a place for organized religion in my life now, but all those Matt Johnsons and Trent Reznors helped in the questioning of God, of religion, as violent and blasphemous as it was.

  When I was going through my punk phase, it was painful. There were periods when I didn’t talk to my dad. His parents were second-generation Americans from Hungary, and it was totally foreign to them that their grandson was showing up with dyed hair and eyeliner. My parents were yelling, “Are you doing drugs?,” and I’d say, “You raised me, you instilled good values in me, along with what is bubbling up now. Trust what you did with me, because I’m still a good person. I am expressing myself in different ways now.” It’s a small town and we’re known there, so I’m sure that was part of it.

  My senior year, I worked at an independent record store, Digital Days, which is now long gone. Musicians would come in, and I don’t know if Trent knew the owner or if he was just promoting himself, but we had an early NIN tape at the store, and we were blown away by it. It was like the perfect hybrid of pop music and industrial music and angst. I had listened to industrial music—Front 242 and Ministry—but the lyrics came through in this. It was very poetic and coming from a raw place, and then there was the shock value that I loved. Pretty Hate Machine is the “desert island” album for me. I can’t tell you why, because there’s nothing necessarily remarkable about it. It’s just a combination of where I was in my life and what was on the disc. Plus, Trent was a Cleveland product, so it’s what I identify with.

  To me, PHM is a standing-tall defiance to everything and anything. I remember New Year’s Eve 1989. I was back in my hometown after my first half year of college, seeing old friends. I was at a party at my buddy’s house, and we played the album. People we invited from Bowling Green came, plus my high school friends. It was like, This is where I’m at. This is where I’m going.

  I loved “The Only Time” from the moment I heard it. It expresses anything you can think of, from lust to rejection to anger. In the liner notes, Trent thanks Prince, and I’m a huge Prince fan, like anything from Dirty Mind to Batman. But to this day, I don’t know if I ever found the Prince influence on the album. In “The Only Time,” you hear every breath. Trent’s doing that sound, the “eh, eh, ohh” after the second repeat of the title. It’s quintessential Trent. You know what? That’s the Prince right there: the cooing and squeaking.

  As a Catholic boy, I always assumed the PHM themes of sex and religion were connected. I wouldn’t say the music I was listening to at the time helped shape my ideas about sex and relationships, but it highlighted the question, Is what I’m doing immoral?

  One of the people I met at the Warehouse Club got me into this whole thing, and she became my girlfriend. She was very free and listened to all this music I’d never gotten into. She was artistic and really pushed me to write and explore that side of myself. It was cool, but I look back at it now, and it was also fucked up. All my friends’ parents were married in our perfect little world. But her parents were divorced. Her dad was manic-depressive, and she had this fucked-up life.

  She ended up moving to the West Coast, and I thought, What did I do to drive her away? It had nothing to do with me, I know that now, but back then I felt angry and helpless. One of my guilty pleasures is watching The Real World. To those kids on the show, everything hinges on this moment. That is your life at 18. Those anxieties and insecurities are very much in the lyrics on PHM. I remember when I met my wife and we were comparing the romantic skeletons in our closets. Everybody’s got shit, but you get to a point in your life where you realize that the world is bigger than you.

  Now when I listen to PHM, I hear myself 15 years ago, and it’s like a bookmark in my life. I’m not that angry poet person anymore, but it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. Same with the album. Sometimes people think, The music’s crap, but at least I got the memories, but I think it holds up. It’s like Citizen Kane in that you watch it and think, It’s so cliché, but when it was released, it was brilliant! PHM made alternative and industrial music acceptable. It defined those clichés.

  When I was 21, I worked for Disney, but I quit because I was offered a job at a Hilton on Sanibel Island. I moved down there in December, and in February I got fired. I went back to my apartment and for 36 hours just listened to Broken and Fixed. That’s all I remember, because I was completely smashed. Then I came out of it and said, Okay, what do I have to do? How do I break my lease? That’s my personality: control what you can. But I needed that mourning. I will never forget playing those two albums over and over. I was so embarrassed to be fired, and it was toward the end of the dark period of becoming an adult. Even then I knew I had to move past it.

  Broken was a quickie, whereas PHM was a long-term relationship. Broken is much too violent and angry. I don’t go there anymore. The Downward Spiral was the turning point for me as a fan of NIN. That’s where I left Trent. It’s not an album that I listen to from start to finish, whereas PHM to me is like a cassette or record, I expect B to follow A. It was then that the machine took over, the appropriation of the product to the frat boys. I’d never listened to The Fragile until my wife picked it up.

  I saw Trent a lot in the PHM era at the Empire Club and all those places in Cleveland that are now gone. At the club there were the new-wave kids and the art-school people who knew what was happening and were there to see the band. And then you had the traditional college kids who were just there to drink. You could see the confusion and anger in their eyes, like, This is not right. Where is “Brown Eyed Girl”?

  These places would be dank, dark, and bathed in a specific light. I remember shows being lit in red or purple. And just the ferocity onstage and hearing those live instruments with the synthesizer. I am not a big guy, but I would be down there in whatever semblance of a pit for as long as I could. It was that aggressive, animalistic bass pulling you, propelling you forward. Looking back, it almost seems like the cornstarch stuff was the only way Trent could get through that fourth wall. It was just a cloud of music and emotion and cornstarch.

  I’d never been to a NIN show other than those during the PHM era, so I had my reservations about going to the Blossom show, because PHM is so specific to me and to certain periods of my life. I was worried
that I would feel out of place, that there would be all these new fans, all kids. My wife (who is also a big NIN fan) and I were walking around after Bauhaus’ set, and we had the same conversation that surely every 30-something person did: “Look at all this Hot Topic! Back in my day, we had to go to a thrift store to buy this shit.” I laugh at the fact that the goth subculture is pop culture now, how you’ve got characters like Violet Parr in The Incredibles, the archetype of the introverted, introspective artist-type kid. I see Hot Topic as a bastardization, but I can understand why it is adopted by so many people. I mean, I adopted it myself, and it is so much a part of who I am, inside.

  I remember at one point during the show, Trent said, “It’s good to be home, all grown up,” and my wife and I looked at each other and were like, Man, that is just way too appropriate, because that’s how we felt. I knew once the show started that I was supposed to be there, that I was supposed to come back to that experience of Trent’s music and lyrics and presence. I had forgotten how much muscle was behind NIN when there were a live guitar and drums. The album sounds incredibly sterile compared to hearing it live. When they did “Head Like a Hole” to close the show, it was absolutely ferocious. I was just enjoying the moment, being there with my wife. Everything about that night was right, even the rain.

  Ringfinger

  Aaron, 29, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio

  Aaron responded to a flyer I placed at Blossom Amphitheater. We met shortly afterward on a few weekend afternoons in his windowless law office in Boardman, Ohio.

  I grew up on the south side of Youngstown until I was 8, and then my family moved to Canfield. We moved because the area was getting to be not so good. My parents knew there was some violence in the area, and there were reports of a drug house down the street. My dad grew up in western Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. He went from high school into the Reserve around the time of Vietnam. He somehow avoided that, and started working at Westinghouse in Sharon, and then moved here and started working at the GM plant in Lordstown. He had one other job, but other than that he worked at GM his entire life. My mom grew up in Niles in an old, Italian family, and she was a nurse until I came along, and then she didn’t work until I was about 13.