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

by Carr, Daphne

  My parents were absolute hippies. My mom had long black hair parted down the middle, and my dad still has long hair. They were into the lifestyle, the drugs. My dad has some hysterical “bad acid” stories. But then my parents became born-again. My dad was a big music fan and was really into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. I have a picture of him wearing those huge headphones as he’s rocking me to sleep, but by that time he was probably listening to Christian rock. The law was that you separate from the world and stop listening to music, so my dad sold his collection, which he now regrets. I have a picture of them going to Jesus Fest ’74 with my aunt and uncle.

  I have a natural younger brother, but after him they told my mom she couldn’t have any more children, so they became foster parents, and that’s been a full-time job for them. We started off with one, and the next thing you knew, there were three. We’d have crack babies with monitors, a number of handicapped children, a few whom my parents ended up adopting as well. Right now I’m not even sure of how many children there are—I think six or seven.

  My parents kept adding additions to the house, and at some point they asked if I would move into the basement. I had my own little world down there. By then, they no longer inspected everything I was reading and listening to, and I got tapes of music from a friend whose older neighbor always fed him good music. One day, when we were playing “Mortal Combat,” he put on Broken. Before that I had been listening to Metallica, which wasn’t as phony as the hair-metal bands, and I picked up on the guitar sound. Then he put on Pretty Hate Machine. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I got him to make me a tape, and I listened to it obsessively in my room.

  My favorite song on the record has always been “Terrible Lie.” I liked the questioning of God that was going on. That last line, “I want so much to believe,” always brought it all home to me. It would’ve been so much easier for me if I had gone along with it all. If I hadn’t questioned it, everyone would’ve been a little happier. Instead, I was the one who was always like, “Wait a second here.”

  I think the terrible lie is that religion and God are somehow going to save you from this life, and if you believe, you’ll see everybody in heaven. The betrayal is that it doesn’t exist, it is all, for lack of a better word, a facade. In the song, Trent’s definitely not a believer. The opening lines are “Hey God,” but it’s like a letter addressed to somebody who doesn’t exist, like, “Dear diary.”

  I struggle with it every day, whether or not God exists, but my big problem has always been with organized religion. I think we don’t want to acknowledge that our lives may be meaningless. There’s a lot to Marx’s statement that religion is the opiate of the masses. People want to believe that if they’re suffering on earth and don’t make a lot of money, don’t find themselves in an optimal situation, that it’s going to be okay in the second life that religion speaks of.

  I don’t think when Trent wrote “Terrible Lie” he was necessarily questioning the politics of religion. I’ve always looked at “Head Like a Hole” as how people view wealth. For me, money is always something that’s worshipped, whether it’s through materialism or whatever. “HLAH” is probably the only song on PHM that has a political bent to it. You can easily connect “HLAH” to being antiauthority and rebelling against kind of a structure that’s placed to hold you down, whether it’s political or socioeconomic.

  I didn’t hear the anger so much as I heard the question. And that’s what resonated with me. That was just a big thing for me, asking, “Does God exist?” and “What am I supposed to believe?” For an example, somebody in church will go on about how I should never drink alcohol or smoke, because those are bad, bad sins. Then why do I go to church with all these people who will stuff their faces with giant plates of food at a church picnic? Isn’t that gluttony? If I wanted to have a beer, everybody would look at me with shocked faces.

  That’s something I struggled with, and in songs like “Sin,” “Kinda I Want To,” and “The Only Time,” I latched onto it, like, Here’s somebody who has these … wants, desires, needs … and is going to experience them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that. My take on it has always been that you as an individual should be able to figure out what is good and what is bad. “Kinda I Want To” is one of my favorite NIN song titles, which I think summarizes what people who grow up in church struggle with. “I want to listen to this kind of music, I want to have these experiences, but if anybody finds out at the church, I’m going to be in trouble.”

  During my freshman year of Kent State, my old youth pastor had a church close to the campus, so I still had a relationship with him and his family. But when I went back home during winter break, I found excuses for not going to church. I had girlfriends and better things to do on Sundays. Leaving the church was a gradual process.

  My wife and I went to the church that my parents attended up until a year ago. My wife grew up Catholic, and when she went to college, she stopped going to church as well. At my parents’ church, she found herself intrigued by how the pastor preached, as he seemed more progressive than those in Catholic churches. She obviously had her points that she disagreed with and things that she thought were odd, like speaking in tongues. But we liked the pastor and wanted him to marry us. He said, “I want to get to know you guys better, and the easiest thing is for you guys to come here a few times so I can get to know you,” and he did a few marriage classes. We got married at an Assembly of God church, but it wasn’t an Assembly of God ceremony whatsoever, which I liked.

  “Ringfinger” is about those situations where you find yourself doing everything you can, and the other person still nails you to the wall. It could be your girlfriend or your parents or religion. It also points out that you’ll deal with a lot if you can get something in return from the other person. I always liked the religious imagery, “hanging like Jesus on his cross,” or the word consecration.

  As a married adult, I listen to it and think that for my wife and me, we have a good relationship, but like with any relationship, there will be times when we annoy each other. But for us, there’s always the big picture. We love each other, and we have something that’s worth building together no matter what happens. If my wife upsets me, I still know that what we have is this marriage together, and that’s what “Ringfinger” is to me.

  I think a lot of people look to marriage as a problem solver. And I think you could hear the song as being about some guy who’s just been henpecked. A lot of people who aren’t married somehow think that’s going to happen to them. “Ringfinger” is really a wrap-up of the whole album. Trent’s been struggling against authority, against religion, with drugs and relationships, and “Ringfinger” says, We’ve gone through this, it was destructive, but in the end, you will learn how to make compromises. But then, with The Downward Spiral, you see that Trent doesn’t do that. Here you have the faintest glimmer of optimism.

  Trent has a negative view of women and relationships on PHM, whether it stems from his fault through his shortcomings or through the faults of women. When you’re younger, relationships are the only thing that matters. On TDS, women go from being these negative influences to being cast more as horrors. Between “Closer” and “Reptile,” I think it’s not about a real relationship; it’s just purely sexual. I think on TDS, the point was to tear away all the flesh to reach this harder, impenetrable shell underneath: “The Becoming.” But I think the course of the album shows that’s not a wise choice. On The Fragile, there’s a lot of references to bruises and decay and flesh, like, I am not just a machine. I am an actual human being, and it’s okay to be hurt. It’s actually a relief to feel these things and to experience a little, rather than trying to be this machine that can’t be damaged.

  The general NIN fan? The message boards I’ve given up on, because I find the level of discourse is not high. It’s scary to me when the most commented thread is “Dreams with Trent in them.” I’d go to concerts and feel like an outsider. I wasn’t all dyed up, I did
n’t have crazy tats, and I’d be there with my relatively short hair. I’d get looks like, What are you doing here? You can’t possibly be a real fan, and it was like, Sorry, I have a job that I have to look professional for, so I can’t go nuts.

  When I was in law school, I was the alternative guy. I remember there was this big group meeting that people wanted to have my first year, and NIN was playing at the MTV Video Music Awards. It had been some time since Trent came out of his hole, so I said, “I’m staying home to watch this,” and one of the guys was shocked. When the Fragility tour hit, the first night was in Cleveland, and I was there. I was like, Screw it, I’ll wear my NIN shirt to class, and everybody just looked at me like, What the hell’s wrong with you?

  I live in Cuyahoga Falls, outside of Akron. I often work in Youngstown but I don’t live here, because my wife’s job is there. I feel bad for the city when I come out here. I go downtown to the courthouse and see decay, all these boarded-up stores, and the remnants of this once vibrant steel industry that’s never been replaced, and it just seems like a town that hasn’t quite figured out how to move into the new century.

  I think the citizens of Youngstown have a right to feel betrayed by the economic system that we have in place, because a lot of these people worked hard for a long time and don’t have a lot to show for it. But it’s also a religious town. People in this area definitely believe in God. I don’t know if their belief has necessarily been rewarded in terms of any sort of financial security. So I do like this area, and there are parts to it that are wonderful, but mostly it’s just decaying. What was once a wonderful area is now being overgrown by weeds.

  Leader of the Black Parade

  Pretty Hate Machine was not an overnight success. It only hit gold status in 1992. So Nine Inch Nails fans had to be made listener by listener until they reached a mass. Early Nails roadie Marky Ray calls the first audiences a “college-rock presence” that was unfocused but eager for new sounds. “Metal was such a huge presence, and no one knew where things were going. They were all in dreads with tattoos and piercings, just, like, hungover punks. Eighties punks all dressed up with no place to go. They started coming to Nails shows. Trent had his nose pierced, and a lot of us were getting tattooed.”63 Early NIN videos show Trent looking this way, just like his fans—white T-shirt tucked into parachute pants, with a dreaded Mohawk, a scrawny but intense man, twisted, howling.

  Ray remembers that from the earliest gigs, every bit of anger the band put out turned into white heat in the audience. As a 20-something he’d been part of a few furious Black Flag sets, but this was something different. “I was standing there holding Trent’s microphone so he could sing while bodies were stacked like cordwood five feet high and people were pawing at him. And a lot of the shows became like that.” With each show, the synths stayed lean while the guitars got louder and more distorted. Trent started breaking things, all the while covered in cornstarch and chocolate syrup.

  This ferocity earned the band a slot on Jane’s Addiction’s final tour in 1991, a traveling music festival called Lollapalooza, organized by the band’s lead singer, Perry Farrell. Farrell’s mangy tribe of Zep-loving freaks kept underground rock alive throughout the eighties, but they also called forth a new bohemia. Ray remembers looking out into the crowd and feeling that something was about to change. “Hair metal was in its death throes, and this thing was a breath of fresh air, like, Where did all these people come from?” he says. “The black-clad masses had crawled out, and you finally felt like, Family! Fraternity!”

  At Lollapalooza, Nine Inch Nails went from being the unknown act to a crowd favorite in a matter of months. By the end of the summer, they ruled the nascent army Farrell assembled nightly and seemed poised to take its helm once Jane’s called it quits.

  Then came September. Nevermind.

  This chapter is not the story of Pretty Hate Machine’s sonic afterbirth, but rather its commercial one. The oral histories have shown how the album touched the lives of people in unique but related ways. Many discussed the tension of such powerful art being sold in a mass market. Nine Inch Nails is nothing if not an industrial product, and this story is about the industrialization of NIN’s musical world through one particular retail-industrial logic: the mall.

  The “alternative nation” Farrell conjured with Lollapalooza was built up by a record industry that was growing on the strength of the CD format, a flourishing concert network, MTV, emerging alt-rock radio stations, pop-music journalism, and a new paradigm in merchandising. In the 1990s, alternative went to the suburbs through chain store Hot Topic. Nine Inch Nails and Hot Topic formed an early symbiosis that helped each other thrive in a world that was hostile to dissent, radical expression, and nonconformity: the American mall. Both also suffered backlash for mainstreaming and commodifying formerly scarce or subversive ideas. Hot Topic was where sellouts sold the idea that selling out sucked.

  If, as Michael Azerrad states in Our Band Could Be Your Life, post-punk bands like U2 and R.E.M. helped make 1986 the year punk vets first noticed that “the transition from underground to ‘alternative’ was under way,”64 then Hot Topic became a key retail support for the new generation of alternative bands that made 1991 “the year punk broke”65 into the mainstream. The store became the material home for the sceneless scene; it was where the alternative-music culture of the nineties became the mall-based mainstream.

  Within the retail industry, Hot Topic is called a “mall-based youth apparel retailer.” It specializes in licensed music merchandise for its 680 locations nationwide. Its founder, Iowa-born retail veteran Orv Madden, said that the company filled a void. “Prior to this, if you wanted to buy a concert T-shirt, a sticker, a patch or something related to your favorite artist, you had to either go to a concert and buy it out of some guy’s trunk, or go to an urban store in areas such as Melrose in L.A. or the Village in New York.”66 Madden invested his life savings in the first Hot Topic, in Montclair, California, in 1989, because he saw a potential fortune in bringing band T-shirts as well as underground materials, like those hinted at on MTV’s 120 Minutes (begun in 1986), to suburban consumers.

  Hot Topic was not the first retail chain to market the counterculture, but it was the first to cater to a music audience, specifically to fans of music in the post-punk era. Spencer Gifts, a mall chain since 1964, sold merchandise that bordered on the Hot Topic market, but throughout the nineties the store appealed more to the hippie-stoner and metalhead lifestyles. Spencer’s was equal parts low-key head shop, Bible Belt sex shop, and Mad magazine joke shop: a hint of taboo without the actual mess of drugs, sex, or shit. In the back of the store were rows of Lennon, Marley, Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Doors posters, along with racks of GN’R T-shirts. In this ossified vision of music history Hot Topic was insurgent, or perhaps the bratty underling who rejected, rather than coveted, its big sister’s or brother’s record collection.

  Hot Topic opened new stores rapidly in the early nineties, but most American teens still had to find their alternative fashions in out-of-the-way places. Enchanting Silver Tree, a 34-year-old western Pennsylvania woman who is a MySpace friend of my Pretty Hate Machine profile, wrote to me about her experience trying to emulate NIN fashion before Hot Topic:

  My best friend and I hung out at the mall, and it was the summer of 1990 that I was exposed to NIN for the first time. We evolved from our Debbie Gibson, bubblegum existence into our goth/punk selves. At this time it was downtown where we headed to gather our fashions from underground shops and cutting-edge music stores. Armed with our black fishnets, leather jackets, chains, spikes, and Manic Panic, we joined a new revolution of music that would not only influence us as we were, but also mold us permanently. There was no Hot Topic for us. In fact, it was rare to even find appropriate black clothing anywhere at the mall when it all started, and of course, certain music was untouchable at the mall as well. Then it all crumbled under the sellouts of our modern-day goths/punks. It was no longer a lifestyle, just a style.


  The struggle to find things was half the thrill, and if it meant driving around town and meeting new people who shared your style, all the better. Hot Topic made the music and the looks ubiquitous, eroding the potential to communicate dedication simply through alternative style.

  Since many of the emerging alt-rock bands of the nineties were raised on the DIY ethics of the eighties punk scene, they struggled with things like deciding whether to sign to a major label and maintaining political and artistic integrity in the era of mass distribution, corporate financing, and aggressive marketing. Enchanting Silver Tree makes it clear that audiences faced a similar tension in their pursuit of authentic performances of alternative identity. For many who had struggled to find the right, the good, and the cool, Hot Topic was a shortcut to subculture. Those who did shop there were considered poseurs, both for taking an easy route to style and for that style’s being dictated by a large corporation.

  Just as Trent Reznor sounded little like his alt-rock commercial peers, so was he disinterested in the political posturing of the puritan ethics and aesthetics of socially conscious nineties punks or their industrial kin. A synth-loving Kiss fan from a small town who made music to escape failure, he never specifically distrusted the massification of music culture, only the exploitation of creators by those with the money and power. Hot Topic was a perfect fit, a reputable distributor that would carry goods representing his particular worldview to kids like him back in subculture-forsaken places like Mercer.