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

by Carr, Daphne

  Part of the backlash against Hot Topic can be justified not by its goods but by its corporate logic. As a chain whose goal is profit, it has no articulated ethics. It doesn’t carry merchandise from local or underground artists or craftspersons, thus rejecting a core value of the punk scene. Profits come from a distribution system that privileges bands that are either rising or evergreen in national stature, which means either major-label artists or artists who slogged for a decade in the underground. (Yes, they sell Black Flag shirts.) Further, Hot Topic does not take principled stances on merchandise that sparks controversy. Like Nothing Records, the store came under attack in the nineties for its apparent “Satanism,”67 and was pressured to stop selling a number of pagan-oriented items. By the early twenty-first century, Jay Johnson, the company’s senior vice president for investor relations, had developed a generic line about the ethics of Hot Topic merchandise: “We don’t have anything that promotes drugs, alcohol, or violence. We do a very good job of editing the selection. That doesn’t mean everything we sell every mother and father thinks their kids should have.”68

  The other part of the backlash is more complex: it is a critique of consumption in general and the commodification of dissent in particular. Even people who are critical of capitalism and consumption still must live, however uncomfortably, as consumers within their society. The question then becomes one about compromise between ethical stance and needs or desires. As Ellen Willis writes:

  As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression. It is a bribe, but like all bribes it offers concrete benefits — in the average American’s case, a degree of physical comfort unparalleled in history. Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not.69

  Critics of consumer culture—from Herbert Marcuse to The Baffler—often ignore these basic facts: shopping is necessary for survival, it can be pleasurable, and material goods shape and articulate personal identity and thus supply the imagination with much needed stimulus. That shopping has historically been “women’s work” makes it all the more suspect when critics damn it. In the case of Hot Topic’s critics, consumption is not just feminized but infantilized, and the choices on display are systematically devalued for their potential for “real” political content. The suppression happens on both ends, however; the corporate logic of Hot Topic is that it must systematically ignore the radical meanings suggested by gender-neutral clothes and makeup, bondage wear, and rainbow stickers reading “Recruiter,” lest it be forced to articulate a pro-genderqueer, pro-teen sexuality, and pro-gay and lesbian stance just when these are hot political topics. Still, the items are on offer to all.

  Making difference accessible to those who need it is a key value for punk, and by that logic Hot Topic and Nine Inch Nails fulfill a needed role. Watching David Bowie in 1972, the performances of Trent Reznor in 1994 or Marilyn Manson in 1996 could provoke the thought, “I am weird like that,” a recognition that might begin and end with a T-shirt, but also might go further. Certainly there was something queer about Nine Inch Nails, especially in the first half of the nineties, as Reznor explored masochism in lyrics, in videos full of BDSM imagery taken from various gay, gothic, and high-art contexts, and in erotically charged live performances that left male and female fans alike questioning the limits placed on their pleasure. Reznor’s own fraught masculinity—especially with the misogynist metaphors, the exclusive homosociality of his musical career, and the fact that Manson’s autobiography says Reznor took part in sexual exploitation—might make him seem less than progressive, but the desire his performances provoke is no less real. Perhaps it is these daydreams, full of sex for pleasure in forms that they think should inspire guilt, that truly worry parents.70

  Teenage years are synonymous with the creation of identity. Status is foregrounded for teenagers because it is virtually the only form of capital they can access. But there are allowances and first jobs, and that capital is courted in the new empires of teen shopping. The demographic for Hot Topic is 12–22 years old, suburban, and lower-middle class. Successful artists for the store are those who reflect the concerns that their listeners know well: love, sex, fear, peer acceptance, social control, and disillusionment. Nine Inch Nails did it throughout the early nineties, and Marilyn Manson took the baton in the mid-decade. Green Day’s American Idiot and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade ruled the 2000s: all offer rage at the scourges of suburbia—consumerism, predatory religion, social isolation, and the forcible assimilation of difference—but none offer solutions. They are not messiahs, only critically conscious older friends, yet they do offer tidbits of style that a teen can pick up at Hot Topic to signify that something is working itself out in this young mind and body.

  The upper limit of Hot Topic’s demographic is no coincidence. A successful shopper at the store grows too wise for it and learns to reject it, as that person either becomes more enmeshed in the politics of counterculture or ages out of rebellion. The good thing for Hot Topic is that as long as there are suburbs, there will be malls and angry 13-year-olds.

  The Antichrist of Suburbia

  The mall has been a symbolic home to the American teen since the fifties, but the home hasn’t always been the happiest one. The enclosed mall is a concept that became a fixture of postwar suburbia. They emerged in midwestern states and towns such as Minnesota, Detroit, and Cleveland, quickly replacing downtown outdoor shopping districts. The corporations that ran malls grew to prefer chain stores to local businesses because the former had big-money national advertising and client bases. This created a network of homogenous shops that catered to increasingly homogenous tastes, a kind of industrialization of the shopping experience.

  Just as malls made for a more generic shopping experience, the spaces they came to occupy in American society moved beyond consumption to the realm of the political. Malls were created to be exclusive enclaves away from the urban and poor, and many mall-leasing agents fought (and continue to fight) against public transportation access, freedom of speech within mall property, and loitering, while fighting for teen curfews.

  On the 50th anniversary of the mall, nearly two-thirds of Americans consider them to be a focal point of communities and good community partners, according to an April 2007 survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers.71 The 1,000-plus respondents were 18 and over. Teens may feel differently, as they spend more time but less money in malls than adults do. In 1997, the first survey of teen shopping habits was released by the International Council of Shopping Centers, which reported that more than 80 percent of teens visited a mall at least once a month, and 56 percent visited a mall weekly. On average, teenagers spent $20 less than older shoppers, and 1 in 5 teens made no purchase at all. They also spent an average of 90 minutes in malls, compared with others’ 75 minutes.72 While the survey proved that teens weren’t just loitering, it did show that the mall is a social space as much as a commercial one. And for a significant minority, Hot Topic becomes a focal point of mall-based sociability.

  In the late nineties, the average teen spent $3,000 per year on apparel, food, and entertainment, and in 2010 the biggest generation of teens increased to 32 million.73 While this demographic has created a bubble of teen-based culture, it also means too many kids spending too much time in malls with too little spending for mall retailers. A March 2007 article in the St. Louis Dispatch reported that an increasing number of malls had instituted “parental escort policies” to limit the number of unsupervised teenagers on weekend nights. The idea was to end loitering so that families could feel safe wandering the mall halls on weekends. In the article, Patrice Duker, a spokesperson for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said, “The mall
is there for the act of commerce, not just to hang out.”74 So two-thirds of Americans think malls are positive community centers, but only if those menacing people under 18 are contained in a parental-pickup pen in the food court after 3 p.m., at least on the weekends. For many teens, this is its own form of betrayal, and for shops like Hot Topic it could lead to disaster.

  Shock Value/Stock Value

  When Hot Topic was founded, it had few national competitors, and so finding a space to draw the teen eye and dollar was easy. The chain grew quickly, and by 1997 the company saw $44 million in sales from its 83 locations. Throughout the nineties, the Lollapalooza masses showed that there were different values for beauty and different presentations of gender and sexuality than those offered by and in mainstream society: neo-tribal body art; piercing; clothes that gave the body a new or strange silhouette; cosmetics that crossed or simply ignored the boundaries between women and men. Hot Topic seized on the materials of this “deviance.” While grunge standard bearers like Pearl Jam and Nirvana blended more with the code of Spencer’s, it was at Hot Topic where the edgier vibe of the decade flourished. Rebellion or deep meaning, the price was the same for everyone.

  If 1991 was the year punk broke, 1994 was the year goth broke.75 With the release of The Downward Spiral; Marilyn Manson’s first album, Portrait of an American Family; and the films Interview with the Vampire and The Crow, mainstream depictions of goth peaked. Hot Topic couldn’t have been more poised: from 1989 to 2001, the store took the physical form of a Germanic castle, with faux-decrepit walls and inset gargoyles. Merchandise was dimly lit with pin spots. A twisted spiderweb metal gate welcomed shoppers.

  Perhaps not by coincidence, 1994 was a golden age for NIN. The Crow was touched by Reznor’s Nothing Records label twice: NIN’s cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” was on the soundtrack, and the graphic novelist James O’Barr, whose work inspired the film, was briefly on the label as part of Trust Obey. In 1995, Pretty Hate Machine climbed from gold to platinum to double platinum (as of September 2010, it had sold 3.2 million copies, only 400,000 fewer than TDS), while the strength of the market allowed Hot Topic to go public in 1996, raising $24 million.76 Orv Madden called Nine Inch Nails a “core artist” for the store: a band that drove the whole generational aesthetic.77

  It was the commercial high point of Nine Inch Nails, but Hot Topic was still building its empire among disaffected teens. The question for the store was who could replace Trent as the next leader of the black parade. The answers were and are hashed out in the five-mile strip of former cattle ranches and citrus farms that is the City of Industry, California, where the corporate brain of Hot Topic resides. This random swath of the San Gabriel Valley was incorporated in 1957 to be a Foreign Trade Zone. Some 2,200 businesses flocked there, while the town boasts only 777 residents. The city is funded through a retail tax collected at its local mall. Hot Topic moved its headquarters there just as The Downward Spiral was released. This is where the future of alt-rock retailing is predicted, or perhaps decided.

  Russ Jimenez, the marketing manager of Hot Topic, says everyone at headquarters has “a passion for music that’s an important part of our identities” and that “a lot of our store employees are in bands, but even those who aren’t go to see bands live all the time.” Employees’ concert tickets are free if they write up fashion reports afterward. Madden mandated a “no dress code” at the office to make the quest for hip a personal one for the staff. The corporate boardroom is said to have a full performance stage and be furnished with shabby-chic furniture and oversize rugs. Jimenez says it is in this boardroom where Hot Topic performs the “ancient Chinese secret” of picking which bands to promote. The recipe involves going to “tons of shows” and getting “feedback from stores.”78

  In the nineties, Hot Topic was on the cutting edge of computer networking, so that all its stores could report to headquarters for daily sales. With constant surveillance of street trends and store sales, Hot Topic was a paragon of flexible response to music and fashion trends. The employee observations often paid off: an employee in the mid-nineties reported that kids at raves carried glow sticks but had nowhere to put them, so the company quickly manufactured jeans with special pockets to hold them.79 The same thing happened whenever a new rocker’s MTV look provoked headlines. The store’s HQ always had the network on. The fashion could be found soon after in Hot Topic.

  But most people don’t want to dress like rock stars; they want to wear T-shirts of rock stars. This is where the real money is for the chain: licensed apparel. The major interior visual statement of Hot Topic is its selection of T-shirts that are folded squarely and tiled across store walls. This is how the company justifies its trademarked slogan “It’s All About the Music” and how it earns 30 percent of its revenue. Hot Topic is consistently one of the top 10 customers for the major music licensors, making it an industry powerhouse.

  With this volume of sales, Hot Topic has major leverage with licensors. Hot Topic’s trend analysts help pick the bands to license. “When they’re trying to figure out who the next hot artist is to do a licensing deal with, that’s where we come into play. We’ve got our finger on the up-and-coming artists nationwide, and in return for helping the major licensors figure out who to do deals with, they do special things for us,” says Madden.80 Hot Topic brokers exclusive deals with bands and for certain shirt designs. It also orders major shipments of T-shirts in 30- to 60-day lead times, to keep abreast of trends. In the industry, this is known as “just in time” inventory; in economic theory, it is thought to be a classic post-Fordist production strategy, a way for businesses to respond more quickly to niche market demand. An investor’s column endorsing Hot Topic in 2001 explained it this way: “When any musical artist starts to lose popularity, its goods are relegated to less store shelf space in favor of the ‘hot band’ that has replaced it as the new big thing.”81 This keeps Hot Topic nimble in the fickle world of teen taste, but also contributes to the backlash against the company.

  It also begs a question: how much does Hot Topic act as mirror to teen fashion and how much as an influence? Hot Topic has a huge distribution network, and each store has limited space for selling band merch. By giving an artist space on its walls early on, usually coordinated with a push from the label and radio play, Hot Topic can help promote the bands it claims it only supports. Jimenez emphasizes that the company prefers to work with artists early in their careers: “It’s important for us to find emerging bands, because we’re in a good place to support them.”

  It’s no surprise that many of the bands featured at Hot Topic in the nineties were from Nine Inch Nails’ parent label, Interscope. That label, more than any other major label of the era, saw the economic value in putting renegade sounds by challenging artists into the mainstream, beginning with its controversial distribution of Death Row Records artists Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur.82 The label then cultivated Nine Inch Nails and its Nothing Records roster as its flagship alternative-rock voice, having freed Reznor from his disastrous TVT deal with the promise of creative control and his own label for artist development. As detailed in the introduction, Interscope profited mightily from the pop-music moral panics throughout the decade, managing to be edgy in both the urban and alternative formats.

  The formula for a good Interscope rock band might even have had something to do with their ability to tie in to the Hot Topic distribution share. Was the band tied to an already mature, diffused subculture like Manson and goth? Could their look be merchandised like the ska-punk threads or bindis of No Doubt? One of the reasons Hot Topic avoided grunge and more socially conscious punk was that those genres had a look one could get secondhand. Hot Topic’s symbiosis with Interscope bands went into the shop’s second decade with the skinny jeans and glam goth-punk of AFI and the fingerless glove garage of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among others. But Hot Topic is clear in keeping its demographic in place: there are few, if any, Interscope rap artists, or any other black musicians, rep
resented on Hot Topic’s store walls.

  The Downward Spiral

  By 1999, the alternative generation had effectively ended (the last consecutive Lollapalooza was in 1997), and a new generation focused on rap-rock, nu-metal, and post-grunge. Hot Topic got competitors: Pacific Sunwear, Gadzooks, Buckle, Wet Seal, and even Spencer’s. In 2001, the design team JGA remodeled Hot Topic in a nightclub style with brushed steel and industrial architectural elements against glass, faux brick, and red ceilings: a mall space modeled after postindustrial reuse. Even Nails changed to a more streetwear-informed look, while the music of The Fragile era became less aggressive and more introspective, and the uglier emotions of NIN’s early albums eddied around with late nineties rockers like Linkin Park.

  Throughout the early 2000s, a mix of nu-metal, pop-punk, and emo-punk merchandise carried the store. The rise of glam emo—with its androgynous, neo-Edwardian costuming—proved a temporary boon, as did the overwhelming popularity of Slipknot and Insane Clown Posse. But there was no hit band on the level of Nails or Manson, so Hot Topic looked to promote other pop-cultural icons. Take, for example, its 2002 SpongeBob SquarePants campaign, which a former longtime employee called the “beginning of the end” for her. In 2003, CEO Betsy McLaughlin was calling for “shirts that diss SpongeBob”83 to counter the effect.

  After 15 years of unstoppable growth, Hot Topic stock nosedived in 2004, and has been shaky ever since. It traded at a high of $31 in January 2004, but by the summer of 2010, it was trading at around $5.14. Back in July 2004, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported that “trends toward preppy looks and bright colors, primarily pink, are hurting the company’s sales,”84 a signal that Hot Topic’s main look was waning among teens. A company built on the ethos that “black is always the new black” cannot so easily carry preppy pink, and since 2004, Hot Topic has had an identity crisis in trying to find apparel that represents the new alterna niches. In 2008, a retail reporter wrote that “being ‘on trend,’ i.e., keeping ahead of the style curve to lure fashion-conscious shoppers, is just as important as economic climate” and that Hot Topic “is increasingly seen as decidedly off-trend.”85