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

  PRETTY HATE MACHINE

  Praise for the series:

  It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review

  Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone

  One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut

  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)

  We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

  For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit 33third.blogspot.com

  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  Pretty Hate Machine

  By Daphne Carr

  2011

  The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 Daphne Carr

  “Buckle of the Rust Belt” map illustration © 2011 Scott Gursky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carr, Daphne.

  Nine Inch Nails′ Pretty hate machine / by Daphne Carr.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8194-7

  1. Nine Inch Nails

  (Musical group). Pretty hate machine. 2. Rock music fans—

  United States. I. Title.

  ML421.N56C37 2011

  782.42166092′2—dc22

  2010043722

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Becoming

  Mercer, Pennsylvania

  Head Like a Hole

  Terrible Lie

  Down in It

  Youngstown, Ohio

  Sanctified

  Something I Can Never Have

  Kinda I Want To

  Sin

  Cleveland, Ohio

  That’s What I Get

  The Only Time

  Ringfinger

  Leader of the Black Parade

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works cited

  For Luke Patton

  Introduction

  Before the trench coat mafia, there were other teen scapegoats in the suburbs.

  Druggies, wastoids, losers, freaks, loners, poor kids, LD kids. Kids who’d transferred in; kids whose parents didn’t care, didn’t wash their clothes, didn’t pack lunches; kids whose parents were freaky religious and/or drunks. Kids who didn’t, couldn’t, or tried and failed to believe. Kids with speech problems, skin problems, or other problems. Kids whose parents grounded them for everything, for nothing. Kids who shot out the windows of school for fun, shot squirrels, burned things, cut themselves, snuck out, stole things, ran black markets. Kids who drew, played guitar, skateboarded, wandered from the smoking fence moon-eyed in the morning, wrote poetry, played video games or computer games or did things with computers that adults didn’t understand. Kids who hung out at Denny’s instead of Perkins because they knew their place. Kids who already knew better than to check out books on the occult, home chemistry, sexual deviance, or mental disorders, so they threw them out the library window and picked them up outside. Kids who lived in basements, in small, rundown houses, in bad neighborhoods, across the tracks, with one parent, with grandparents, alone. Kids who hung out at the bowling alley or arcade, in parking lots, at coffee shops, bookstores, or Chinese restaurants, nursing drinks and scrounging dollars for cheap food. Kids who did not get cars at 16, new clothes in September, Lisa Frank folders, Air Jordans. Kids who stared too long, fell asleep in class, walked too slowly with their heads down, didn’t get the joke or made jokes no one else got.

  Trent Reznor, the only long-term member of Nine Inch Nails, was one of those kids. He did not create teenage angst, but he gave it an early nineties voice and face. With his enormous success, he became a hero and a folk devil. Through his music and performances he united the black-clad masses—along with those not wearing black who were still dark—into one.

  This is a book about those masses. I have often referred to NIN1 fans as a trench coat mafia, and I will do so here in spite of, or because of, the term’s loaded history. It originated during the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999, when killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were still shooting inside the school. Two hours into the television coverage of the event, reports that a group called the Trench Coat Mafia might be responsible began to appear.2 Students watching the news while still trapped inside the school repeated the story back to reporters once they’d fled. That the self-named Trench Coat Mafia of Columbine High—a group of teens united through their love of computer gaming, extreme-music fandom, antischool sentiments, hacky sacking, and cowboy dusters—was largely disbanded by 1999 and had virtually no affiliation with the two murderers was ignored in the ensuing media spectacle.

  Overnight, the word “Columbine” summed up and validated the nineties hysteria over teen violence, while the Trench Coat Mafia became a symbol of the enraged American middle-class white male teen perp.3 It was a classic moral panic, a media-amplified vilification of a group whose real or imagined attributes threatened a social order.4 In looking for someone to blame for the murderers’ rage, the media pointed to this “mafia,” found its members’ web pages and yearbook profiles, then implicated the popular culture that the group consumed.

  Evidence soon rolled in showing that the Trench Coat Mafia was not responsible for the massacre—but also that the killers shared similar tastes with the group. The innocent and the guilty were lumped into one. The two killers, one a ruthless psychopath and the other a depressive follower, were portrayed as part of a complex, clandestine network that wreaked havoc on innocent kids on account of long-simmering ill will. (According to Columbine by David Cullen, this stylized infamy is exactly what one of the killers hoped for.) The panic was spread by follow-up reports questioning whether this kind of violence was imminent wherever unmonitored boys played first-person shooter games, watched violent movies, used anti-Christian expressions, or consumed any other mass-produced visions of antisuburban affect.5

  As for what music the Columbine “folk devils” listened to, look no further than Nothing Records. Launched in 1992 as a vanity label for Trent Reznor and John Malm Jr. as part of Nine Inch Nails’ move to Interscope Records, Nothing was enjoying its highest moment of v
isibility with the goth-rock turned glam band Marilyn Manson. While it was reported later that Harris was a bigger fan of electronic music such as Orbital, Rammstein, and KMFDM, and that Klebold listened to Nine Inch Nails,6 Manson’s image fit the panic’s narrative best, so the media played up the idea that Trench Coat Mafia members were Manson fans.7 Yet with first-person shooter games “Doom” and “Quake,” as well as the movie Natural Born Killers also name-checked by the killers, the network of blame for the Nothing roster grew even stronger: Reznor made music for “Quake” and produced the soundtrack for the film.

  Targeting Manson was easy in 1999, because the band had just spent three years in the media spotlight for its supposed assault on family values. Nine Inch Nails spent the early nineties singing of atypical desire, religious skepticism, and depressive mental states, and for this the band had received an increasing amount of negative attention from American social conservatives.8 As a protégé of Reznor, Marilyn Manson added more of industrial’s self-reflexivity and goth’s camp to NIN’s themes, with lyrics and a stage show designed to call attention to the power of taboo and provoke public controversy. In the time between Manson’s first and second album, Interscope was publicly challenged by the National Political Congress of Black Women and the conservative lobby group Empower America.9 The coalition claimed that Nine Inch Nails and the label’s gangsta rappers used “vulgar and misogynistic lyrics” to “glorify violence and promote it among children.”10 It called for Interscope’s parent company, Time Warner, to divest, which the conglomerate promptly did.

  Manson’s second album, the Reznor-produced Antichrist Superstar (1996), was a death-rock-opera mockery of evangelical faith narratives. Conservatives took the bait and organized protests; politicians chastised the band’s lyrics and performances as pornography; and a senate subcommittee hearing on “music violence” was held in 1997—it included a parent’s testimony on Manson’s music as a “cancer” killing the nation’s teens, and Senator Joe Lieberman’s appeal for further divestment from Interscope.11 When the events at Columbine exploded, the framework that would make Manson the apparent inspiration of murderous suburban teens had long been in place.

  Moral panics often provoke disproportionate responses, and one effect of Columbine was an aggressive set of policies for monitoring teens in schools. Across the United States, high schools were fitted with metal detectors, surveillance, and a police presence.12 A number of schools took up antibul-lying measures but at the same time instituted zero-tolerance policies13 that profiled students who were thought likely to be violent. Such policies targeted kids who publicly confessed despair or anger, or who merely wore shirts of bands that expressed those emotions.

  Anyone under 18 with a trench coat and/or a heavy music collection was put on notice. A generation of outcasts who’d found beauty, solace, and community through dark music and aesthetics were pushed into the spotlight and labeled dangerous. Ten years after Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, in the midst of a mainstream moment for the goth and industrial subculture that the band had nurtured, young people suddenly felt pressure to bury their feelings, change their looks, take their fandom underground, and silence their sounds.

  The history of Columbine haunts this book, and there are four things in the Trench Coat Mafia narrative that contribute to its framework. First, the media panic around Columbine revealed something when it named Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and KMFDM as the music of violence in the nineties: the profound genre shifts in the music scapegoating of the past 30 years. “Satanic” bands like Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest represented the fears of the seventies, while sexually explicit pop stars like Prince were the mid-eighties devils to the Parents Music Resource Center. By the nineties, rap artists like 2 Live Crew and Snoop Dogg had become the locus of panic. It was only for a brief moment, inspired by Nothing Records, that rock-derived music returned to shock the masses. That Columbine happened in the middle of Manson’s “Death of Rock” tour only boosted what may have been the last time the genre had enough mainstream audience to pose a moral threat.

  A second part of the Trench Coat Mafia image is that it was powerful for its costume. The trench coat was part of British military dress, and became ubiquitous in middle-class men’s fashion by the 1930s. It’s the city kin of the duster, the floor-length jacket that was the de facto uniform of the Old West. Both the duster and the trench came to be anachronistic alternatives to the more sporty, casual men’s fashion in the postwar era. The long lines and militaristic functionality are equal parts fancy dress and menace. The trench was adopted in the more experimental edges of post-punk, especially by those bands that explored the psychology of horror through fascist deadpan, like Joy Division, and it went on to become central to the “rivethead” style of industrial. Goth and metal fans too have adopted the trench as part of a costume.

  In other words, the trench gives nerds a way to look badass. The long coat is integral in the worlds of film, comics, and sci-fi as well: the cape of the outsider or antihero in a dystopian underworld, whether hard-boiled reality, lawless frontier, or technologically oversaturated future. The trench appears regularly in comics, especially those inspired by pulp fiction, such as Dick Tracy, The Spirit, Sin City and Hellboy, and on the character of John Constantine, who is based on Sting. (Eerily, the first issue in DC Comics’ The Trenchcoat Brigade series arrived the month before Columbine.) Noir films used the trench extensively to show the private eye as anonymous outcast, and neo-noir took up the coat for characters in films from Blade Runner (1982) to Batman (1989). The Crow (1994) brought the trench into its 1990s gothic incarnation, and only a month before Columbine, the trench became programmer chic in The Matrix.

  Reznor was not only a musical icon for his fans, but a stylistic one. His ghostly pallor, lank black hair, combat boots, fishnet stockings, and rail-thin body prone to aggressive, drastic gestures were admired and idealized as an alternative form of bodily grace.14 Although Trent was more fond of sleeveless shirts onstage and leather jackets off, he wore the trench too, first as fetish gear in his earliest press photos, then as Victorian fop in the 1996 “Perfect Drug” video. Ominously, he also wore it when he played the gun-mad Yank whom David Bowie fears in the 1997 video for “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

  Columbine also stood for the further demonization of extreme-music fans not as realists, cynics, or depressives but as latent criminals. This seriously impacted the lives of fans and others who looked the part of the goth into the 2000s, and colors the way older fans speak about their involvement with the music. Yet it is not a crime, or even a symptom, to seek out and support art that engages with darkness and existential drama. It wasn’t even a crime when Dylan Klebold did it (he referred to his depression as “the Downward Spiral”), yet the shame and suspicion cast upon goths took a decidedly juridical tone after Columbine.

  Finally, the media’s Trench Coat Mafia myth grouped the disaffected into a conspiratorial mass. The two killers’ grand plan set them apart from earlier school shooters and made it seem that they were part of some larger underworld, a “mafia” all too real. It added another layer of antiheroic chic to the story, linking Harris and Klebold with a network whose codes—lyrics, online culture, video games—were unintelligible to adult society. But by the nineties, the term mafia was being used freely as a metaphor for any strong, stylish, masculine outlaw culture, like those of rap. For the trench-coat kids too it was a way to boast of their circle as something apart: that its rituals, exclusivity, and strong bonds made it more like a family.

  When I call Nine Inch Nails fans a trench coat mafia, it is to this end: to reclaim the term for a historically situated symbolic community. For serious fans, Nine Inch Nails is a real community. They are linked through this network to Trent Reznor, their musical idol, hero, role model, or creative inspiration. With the world of NIN music as the central node, they also connect with one another, becoming a group by sharing information about the band and the world as viewed
through it. With NIN drawing together and fostering suburban skeptics, fan discussion often turns to social differences, political dissent, and heresy. These are Nine Inch Nails fans’ “family values.”

  We’re in This Together

  By his own admission, Trent Reznor makes music that appeals to this group because he was part of its preceding generation: a lonely prog-rock nerd raised in a nontraditional household in small-town America. In 2000, Revolver magazine offered Reznor the chance to talk with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. To get things started, the magazine asked Reznor how Waters’ music affected his life, and he responded:

  I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania.… I was in high school at the time, and I remember that music had always been my friend — a companion, the brother I didn’t have, or whatever.… I came from a broken home. I was alone a lot as a child. And when The Wall came out, that record seemed very personal to me, even though I was in a completely different lifestyle, place, and situation than Roger would have been at that time. I’d never heard music that had that sort of naked, honest emotion. I had that sense of, “Wow, I’m not the only person who feels this way.” 15

  How Nine Inch Nails came to leave a similar impression on its fans is what I wish to trace in this book. Too often fandom is seen as a form of hysteria: dangerous or pathological, an adolescent phase, unproductive beyond encouraging consumption. As the fans profiled in this book will show, fandom can be a deep, complex, lifelong way to shape one’s values and sense of self.

  This project was inspired by the work of Daniel Cavicchi, whose book Tramps Like Us (1998) shows how Bruce Springsteen fans produce meaning in their lives through the works and stories of a band. Like Cavicchi, I was a fan before I became a scholar, and I came to realize that every step of this project would be a process of self-recognition as well as discovery. My project is a humanistic one, asking how Nine Inch Nails helps its fans make sense of life. This is neither a music critic’s argument for a band’s greatness nor a historian’s case for the significance of the subject’s actions. This book is not much concerned with Nine Inch Nails’ “goodness”—sonic traces showing the net worth of Trent’s talents, his bandmates, his gear, his training, his collaborations—as much as it is with the ethics of Nine Inch Nails’ musical world. This book argues that while Nine Inch Nails’ music can be revolutionary—even as it sits on the shelf at the mall—the meaning and import come from the lived experiences of individuals. I, the author voice I, am one more individual in this project—a critical, scholarly, feminist writer, but also one person—and from many other arguments I build my argument. None of them are the truth.