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

by Carr, Daphne

  In the meantime, Hot Topic’s success spawned an evangelical Christian mallternative, C28, which opened its first store in 2001 and now has 11 stores in California and Virginia. Selling T-shirts, music, jewelry, stickers, and other accessories in a shop that looks just like Hot Topic (and is often placed directly across from the store in malls), C28 refers to its business as mall-based evangelical outreach programs geared to teens through the social encounter provided by retail exchange.86 The company taps into the ever-expanding universe of Christian corporations that earn profits while claiming to be “not of this world.” Its shirts use the same distressed fonts, tattoo art, silk-screen motifs, and bold graphics as those at Hot Topic, and employ slogans like “Broken” (from the Book of Psalms) or “Liar” as edgy self-appraisals reclaimed from the lyrics of profaners like Nine Inch Nails.

  C28 calls itself an “alternative to the mainstream mall stores,” part of the ongoing campaign by the Christian right to use the language of progressive social causes to rebrand itself. C28 sells one part of its message—hope, salvation, and belonging—as sexy, the evangelical part as character-building suffering, and its regressive politics as “rebellious” against secular mainstream values. Two striking examples of the appropriation of progressive style for conservative politics are on C28 shirts: a red tee features a Che Guevara-style silk screen of Ronald Reagan with an antiabortion slogan, while another has a cute blue monkey raging against either paternity or evolution: “I’m not your daddy.” Those who wish to open a C28 franchise must, in addition to having the proper capital, “articulate his or her testimony profession of their faith,” which includes a clause on purity from “harassment, promiscuity, pornography, fornication, adultery, homosexuality and any other deviant behavior delineated in scripture.”87

  In the early twenty-first century, the American mall has become not just an acknowledged retail and social center, but also a battleground of ethical consumerism. With C28’s stance so articulated, the dedication of Hot Topic to bringing progressive undergrounds into the mall mainstream becomes a more explicitly political act that it has no corporate policy to back. In this climate, the rise of the Twilight books and films takes on an even more insidious tone. Hot Topic CEO McLaughlin called Twilight a “once a decade” license deal,88 and indeed the store has shifted toward the pre-teen abstinence-only eroticism that Twilight presents, while only three years ago it prominently displayed “Rainbows Are Gay” T-shirts and lauded the gender-fucking emo scene as its own. But emo didn’t hit, and it didn’t last. If Hot Topic is only reflecting youth culture, then the twenty-first century rock-based entertainment industry has failed to produce a compelling star with an independent, counterculturally minded message on the level of Nine Inch Nails who can put forth skepticism in the mall marketplace, which is more than a problem for music. It’s a problem for American progressive culture.

  Year Zero

  The long pause between Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile (1999) and With Teeth (2005) saw not just a change in mall-based retail but in the entire nature of music sales and distribution. In that space Reznor got sober and won a lawsuit against his longtime manager John Malm Jr., thus ending their relationship and signaling Reznor’s renewed interest in the band as a business entity. He began to control the art and economy of Nine Inch Nails with a new intensity, first by connecting the physical CD sales and ticketing back to the well-run and vibrant nin.com website, and then by releasing the tracks to “The Hand That Feeds” and “Only” for open remix. He became more actively engaged in his own marketing and obsessed with the two-way communication possibilities of the so-called “Web 2.0” moment. A flurry of communications began, and the man behind the mass media was exposed: a newly beefy obsessive worker, online video poster, and intermittent Twitterer. In his chatter, he seemed to be more and more like his fans, only super-rich and internationally famous. Some were saddened by this mundane intimacy, but many were thrilled.

  In the wake of the government failure that led to the flooding of his post-Cleveland home of New Orleans, Reznor turned his rage from the personal to the political for Year Zero (2007), an album he wrote on his laptop while touring.89 With it, the entire tone of Nine Inch Nails shifted. Year Zero was his last Interscope album, and the label partnered with Hot Topic to market the release with a national listening party, an online and in-store presale, three exclusive designs of Nine Inch Nails T-shirts, and the “Featured Artist” spot on Hot Topic’s web page. At a listening party in a Glendale, California, mall, no one came.

  Perhaps the “real” fans of Nine Inch Nails in Los Angeles were not at Hot Topic because they were chasing down clues for the band’s prerelease game. Trent got Interscope to hire Web marketers 42 Entertainment to create “Year Zero,” an alternate-reality game with a dystopian-future theme, in which clues were leaked via various media platforms and tracked by fans on the amazingly well-networked web pages of the ninternet. At the same time as the Hot Topic listening party, a van pulled up at a designated billboard on Melrose Avenue, dumped out Nine Inch Nails “resistance propaganda,” including stickers, buttons, and cell phones to use for future clues, then drove away. No money exchanged hands and no music was heard. It was just another strange moment in the ever-unfolding story of the game. “Year Zero” worked because the band’s fans are rabid and obsessive, and will follow the band regardless of their place in the market, even though the fans mostly found them through the market. The alternate reality—a band as the locus for an aesthetic, ethical, playful world—has become real through the ongoing work of fans, the label, the media, and Trent.

  The reality of Hot Topic is that it is a brick-and-mortar rock-music merchandiser facing an increasingly non-brick-and-mortar retail and non-rock era. Its core demographic, those non-driving teens, are being banned from the mall and increasingly finding their own musical and cultural identities online, without as much corporate-controlled mediation. So Hot Topic, like an aging rock band, has a few options: it can serve the dinosaurs by selling nineties acts and novelties, or it can go extinct. The third option is one that NIN has taken: shed the bulk and focus on new, innovative elements of the underground culture. This means ending sentimentality and risking the brand.

  Ghosts I-IV (2008) was, after 20 years of work under the Nine Inch Nails name, the first album in which the politics of creation, production, and distribution were as much in the foreground as the music: the first NIN artifact to fit to the eighties standards for underground industrial music.90 The album was independently released by the band on their label The Null Corporation, and was licensed for noncommercial sharing and remixing through Creative Commons. As a 36-track improvisational, ambient, instrumental album, Ghosts was the kind of thing a major label would have really called an abortion if they’d been asked. Nine Inch Nails had always asserted that the physical object of music delivery ought to be art, so with the Ghosts paradigm, Reznor made both cheaper, easily accessible copies and more luxurious, limited-edition packages. In this way, NIN’s music became both a mass product and an art multiple. Reznor offered free downloads of nine tracks, $5 full downloads, $10 CDs, a $75 deluxe edition, and a $300 ultra-deluxe edition. He sold $1.6 million worth in the first week.91 The album hit the top of Billboard’s Dance/Electronic chart, ranked third on Alternative Albums, and reached No. 14 on the Billboard 200.

  With Ghosts, Reznor’s image was remade. In the nineties, he was portrayed as a gothic bad boy, a brat who was pissed about never getting as much cred as Kurt and who picked fights with rival rockers, and an anti-Christian folk devil. In the second half of the 2000s, he became a symbol of resistance to the corporate music industry, an icon helping to dismantle the very structures that made him, through his use of everyday digital technologies. He became what he always was to his fans: an antihero of postindustrial popular music.

  Hot Topic’s partner MP3 store, ShockHound, was introduced in the fall of 2008. It may have the same edgy, alt-rock design that carries the Hot Topic brand, but the e-shop stocks
genres way outside the brand’s aesthetic. Like its competitors iTunes and Napster, ShockHound is a generic online big box that carries everything it can license. This could mean either that young people are more versatile listeners given the limitless online access or that stocking all subgenres costs nearly nothing in City of Industry hard drives and that the company can take a buck from a Fat Joe fan online just as easily as a 3Oh!3 fan. But it begs the question: Why would any teen, given all the options of online music shopping, use Hot Topic to guide their purchases? Isn’t the point of the internet that it isn’t the mall?

  In a 2008 interview in the New York Times, Hot Topic president Jerry Cook affirmed that merchandise sales drove the chain, but that by focusing on MP3 sales and in-store CD displays, which had always been present but nominal, the company could maintain the illusion of a music-centered business while branching out its T-shirt and poster offers beyond rock for online sales.92 CEO McLaughlin told Billboard in December 2008 that teens no longer perceived of their parents’ music as an affront to their own musical tastes, nor were their tastes as narrow-minded as being limited to the “rock” umbrella, so there was no reason that rebellion needed to be encoded in the online shop.93 Hot Topic has recently posted double-digit sales increases of CDs, as traditional brick-and-mortar record stores close. Soon Hot Topic may be one of the only places to buy music in suburbia, and as it expands online, it no longer signifies the slightest generational, musical, or social alternative, but rather becomes the last-standing record store: mainstream by default.

  A month after Nine Inch Nails’ purported “Goodbye” tour, there was one contemporary T-shirt and one sticker available for the band on Hot Topic’s website. The world NIN created has now grown up, has gone dinosaur or off-trend, or is simply an underground mass of people who no longer need to go to the mall to find the music, one another, and themselves. Hot Topic has found its new market in abstinence-only vampirism. Nine Inch Nails is on hold. And Trent Reznor is married, a father, and living happily ever after.

  So ends 20 years of pretty hate machines.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to my interview subjects for sharing their time and their lives with me. Your passion and dedication kept me going with this project. I truly believe that yours are the stories that needed to be told, and I thank you for telling them to me with such courage. I’d also like to thank all the people I met and interviewed in my travels between Mercer, Youngstown, and Cleveland: Tom Lash, Bill Philson, Steve VanWoert, Marky Ray, Carlo Wolff, Jim Benson, the folks at the Mercer County Historical Society, and the librarians at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor.

  In preparation of the book Elisabeth Donnelly helped me greatly with transcriptions of the oral histories, and Courtney Harris’s copyediting was invaluable. Thanks ladies! I thank the extremely talented Scott Gursky (www.scottgursky.com) for yet another fine bit of cartography. David Barker at Continuum deserves thanks for his amazing patience with me on the project. The 33 1/3 series is a shelter for music writers in this moment of publishing mayhem. Thank you for fighting to keep it going, and for publishing so many great books.

  At various points during the research for this project I consulted with, and thank for their wisdom: Mica Hilson (the synth-pop intellectual), Kerri Mason, Jessica Robertson, Rob Harvilla, Aaron Johnson, Laina Dawes, Elizabeth Keenan, Ann Powers, and my mom and dad. An early version of “The Leader of the Black Parade” was used at the 2007 Experience Music Project Pop Conference, and I thank Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers for their ongoing work on the conference. I would also like to thank Dr. Tom Porcello, whose course on music and technology was an inspiration for “The Becoming.” I am grateful to those who read drafts of the book and made insightful comments: Sarah Dougher, Amy Phillips, J. Gabriel Boylan, Simón Calle, Elizabeth Keenan, Christina Hatcher, Keith Jones, Molly Sheridan, Kerri Mason, Tim Quirk, Anna Stirr, and Toby Carroll. And finally for support in beginning, working on, and finishing this project I would especially like to thank Caleb Waldorf, Kerri Mason, Martin Hůla, Petr Klouček, Neil Sweeney, GirlGroup, and Daphne Brooks, and thank again Tim, Gabe, Ann, and Amy. Much praise to you, my patient and ever-supportive friends. Thank you to Davin Kuntze for enchanting the commodity with design wisdom and book-binding skills, used in the small batch, hand-bound edition of this book. I am grateful to my mom for letting me set up shop back home for the research period of the book, and to my great friends from my Youngstown days, especially Molly Sheridan, John Callery, Randy Rafoth, Tanky Hagg, Nicole Rhody, Mario Pecchia, Isaac Potoczny-Jones, and the BHS trench coat mafia and its mid-nineties house band, Grey Larry. You guys showed me that the local scene mattered most, and were always in my mind in the writing of this book. Also Carolyn Kukura, Jack Hay, Edie Davidson, and Carol Clark deserve my warmest thanks. Good teachers like you gave weirdo kids like us the feedback, direction, and inspiration we needed to become successful, creative, and professional adults. And then there are others, well … you know who you are.

  I want to give heaps of praise to the NIN fan community for its diligent maintenance of the band’s archive. Thanks to ninhotline.net, ninwiki.com, burningsouls.com, 9inchnails.com, ninremixes.com, and to Echoing the Sound and nin.com/The Spiral for making it possible to find esoteric facts, ask odd questions, and find great debate about the band’s history, influence, and meaning. I also want to thank Trent Reznor and all the musicians who have contributed to Nine Inch Nails since the beginning, the roadies and crews who made the shows run smoothly, and the millions of fans around the world, especially those who sang along in the nightclubs, arenas, and amphitheaters of the Rust Belt. It took you to make me realize.

  Notes

  1 Throughout the book I will first use the full title of Nine Inch Nails as well as songs and albums, then switch to acronyms. I will also use Nine Inch Nails’ rather than the more cumbersome Nine Inch Nails’s.

  2 David Cullen, Columbine. New York: Twelve, 2009.

  3 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

  4 While acknowledging the foundational work of Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (MacGibbon and Kee, 1972), I am using the term “moral panic” the way Angela McRobbie and Sara Thornton (1995) do, as an amplification of the symbolic meaning of actions of “folk devils” into larger-scale threats to a perceived set of community standards by various mass-media agents. McRobbie and Thornton are careful to point out that many popular culture figures now seek out the “folk devil” title as status and use the media to these ends, which is surely part of Marilyn Manson’s self-aware and satirical character.

  5 Of course, how “we” should react to save our children is how a moral panic creates the new moral order, which is the very thing Michael Moore interrogated in his 2002 documentary Bowling For Columbine.

  6 The day after the Columbine shooting, local reporter Genevieve Anton interviewed students about the habits of the Trench Coat Mafia, and one student reported, “They listen to stuff like (rock group) Nine Inch Nails, not real happy stuff.” Quoted from “Massacre at Columbine High: The Trenchcoat Mafia outcasts.” The Advertiser, April 22, 1999.

  7 A week after the shootings the New York Times interviewed eight Columbine students. The reporter asked a series of questions about the shooters, the school, and teen culture. To the question, “Adults are concerned about violent computer games and song lyrics. Is this a large part of teen-age life today?” and follow up question, “What’s the appeal of Marilyn Manson?” Dylan Klebold’s self-proclaimed best friend responded, “Okay, they listened to Marilyn Manson, but not like some people. They listened to him every once in a while. They listened to Nine Inch Nails. They listened to Rammstein. They listened to Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM because of the beats. Because Dylan wanted to be a drummer. He didn’t even know what they were saying in Rammstein. He doesn’t speak German. He just liked the beat of the song. The same with Dr. Octagon, D.J. Spookie
[sic], all those techno bands. They’ve got these beats to them.” Quoted from “Terror In Littleton: The Community; Columbine Students Talk of the Disaster and Life.” The New York Times, April 30, 1999, p. 27.

  8 Larry Leibstein and Thomas Rosenstiel, “The Right Takes a Media Giant to Political Task.” Newsweek, June 12, 1995, p. 30.

  9 Alec Foege, “Scorned, Shunned and Doing Quite Nicely.” The New York Times, December 3, 1995.

  10 Robert Wright, “‘I’d Sell You Suicide’: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson.” Popular Music 19, No. 3 (2000), pp. 365–85.

  11 “Music Violence: How Does it Affect Our Children.” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Restructuring, and the District of Columbia of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, November 6, 1997.

  12 John D. Sutter, “Columbine Massacre Changed School Security.” cnn.com, April 20, 2009.

  13 Kate Harding, “Keeping Kids Safe after Columbine: At What Cost?” salon.com, October 12, 2009.

  14 He didn’t just inspire a generation of fans, but cinema as well. See Queen of the Damned (2002) and The Machinist (2004) for the most obvious examples.

  15 Alan Di Perna, “In the Flesh: Trent Reznor Meets Roger Waters.” Revolver, November 2000.

  16 See David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) for more about the legacy of Reagan’s economic and social policies on twenty-first century life.