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

  Like Mozart, Nine Inch Nails has a customized system of opus dating. Albums are called “halos,” and Pretty Hate Machine is Halo 2. Like many older Nine Inch Nails fans, my favorite album is Halo 8, 1994’s The Downward Spiral (those born after 1980 tend to prefer Halo 14, The Fragile). But I chose Pretty Hate Machine, released in October 1989, as the subject for this book because it served as an important node in the messy moment between the Reagan eighties and alterna nineties. It arrived before and helped create a change in rock-derived American popular music that demanded a new record-industry logic, one that by 1994 was a smoothly operating machine.

  PHM also allowed me to tell the story of lower-middle-class white men in the Rust Belt through a narrative beginning with Trent’s birth and leading to the album’s birth, as a mirror of American transition from Industrial to Information Age labor. One account of Pretty Hate Machine origin supposes that it was a teenage symphony to Satan made by an aggro Brian Wilson alone at night on synths in a Cleveland, Ohio, studio. The question here is not if that story is true, but why it is important to fans that it could be. What does this story of Pretty Hate Machine tell us about the world at that time? How did the story of Trent Reznor become a story of solo technological genius giving voice to anger and loneliness, and for whom did these stories resonate? The first chapter, The Becoming, addresses these questions.

  The bulk of this book is devoted to oral histories conducted between 2006–2008 of longtime Nine Inch Nails fans born and raised in the very regions where the album, its creator, and the author of this book come from: Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, and Mercer, Pennsylvania. The book contains ten chapters of fan’s words as framed through the songs of Pretty Hate Machine. Each song chapter presents a life story of a man no older than Reznor (1965) and no younger than PHM (1989). That these stories are all of Euro-American working- and middle-class men is a coincidence turned into a strategy. I went searching for multiplicity, but what I found was that the active female NIN fans (far fewer in number than men) were unwilling to publicly discuss their fandom. In the process I had to write myself out of the song chapters and into the chapter about the city of Youngstown. While I never screened my participants by race or ethnicity, I always came across their Euro-American heritage in the course of meeting or discussion. Targeting African-American or Latina/o NIN fans seemed disingenuous because they are a distinct minority of Rust Belt area fans. (I highly encourage readers to check out Laina Dawes’ forthcoming book on African-American and Afro-Canadian metal fans, What Are You Doing Here? Black Women in Metal and Hardcore, and to see William E. Jones’ 2004 documentary Is It Really So Strange? on L.A.’s Latina/o Smiths fans, to get a larger sense of what alternative rock fandom is like for people of color.) With the white male subjects I settled on, I conducted in-person and online interviews and edited the transcripts into narratives. (My questions were inspired by George Lipsitz and Hazel Carby and form bears debt to Studs Terkel.) I was careful to trace the details of each person’s identity in order to show how the privileged position with which whiteness operates is often contingent on other factors, including economic opportunity, education, religion, geography, sexuality, and gender.

  I aligned each oral history not necessarily with the speaker’s favorite or most evocative song experience—they’d nearly all be “Terrible Lie” in that case—but with how the speaker’s words matched the sonic and textual world of a particular song. If you have a copy of Pretty Hate Machine, listen along to hear the book’s speakers with and against yours. The space between your hearing, their hearing, and my hearing is how we will get into a conversation (or argument) that is part of the point of this book. If the conversation makes us all cringe a bit, so much the better.

  One fan named Gus, for instance, has a desire to return Cleveland to its rock past, one he thinks NIN epitomizes. This might influence his assertion that “Down in It” is not a hip-hop song, no matter how much the drum programming, bass lines, and highly rhythmic declamation of text would otherwise suggest. Another fan, Greg, hears “Sin” as a comment on the immorality of trust, a meaning that never would have occurred to me but which makes sense given the rest of his story. I always thought “Sin” was solved with the word purity, or with Trent strapped half-naked in a gyroscope spun by a dominatrix in the video: a song wrestling with Christian guilt over desire. Maybe you heard it differently. Certainly Christ, suffering, pleasure, and guilt thread through both the album and these men’s histories—although the themes are more explicit in the lyrics than in the discussions with me, a near stranger. With every interview I was more aware that the way people listen and live in private is likely more vivid, wonderful, wrong, and terrible than they ever let on. This book is at least one step closer.

  Contained within the fans’ stories are shocks of intense passion, loneliness, and fear. It’s something besides melancholy: raw, a bit brutal. I honored the subjects by not watering down that horror. It’s probably not a coincidence that one of the interviewees, who goes by the screen name brok3nMachine, rues Trent’s use of rhyme. It seems glib for art that needs to be so ugly.

  One of the projects of being human is making sense of nothingness. For the Nine Inch Nails fans in this book, this means coping with the manipulations of religion and broken families, with messed-up towns and failed governments. It also means coming to appreciate newly formed families, everyday joys, growing older, and becoming satisfied while letting go of rage, despair, and unrealistic expectations. And it means doing so amid dwindling chances for the good life, in the twilight of the American empire, in the place where the tide of prosperity first went out for working-class whites: the Midwest.

  One of the works that haunted me while writing this book is Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter. In my junior year of high school, the vice principal came to my English class and told us a story about how Robert DeNiro followed him for two weeks while studying for his role as the character Michael. I went home and watched the movie, only to be horrified. Why would someone be proud to have been the study for a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet? It was only years later that I understood that, however dark, the film tells a story that needs to be told, one that dramatizes the aftereffects of intense trauma on soldiers in war and at home.

  The setting for the film, Clairton, Pennsylvania, was the first familiar place I ever saw put into art. Since then I’ve sought out films, books, and people who could help me make sense of such places. Those texts inform my understanding of Trent Reznor as an industrial artist for a post–Industrial Age, a skeptic expressing his disappointments in metaphors of faith, and a man making music filled with overt rage rather than sophisticated politics. I see his audience as the generations that grew up after industry left the Midwest, kids whose parents or grandparents fled city centers but who couldn’t escape economic downfall and social problems. The men interviewed in this book walk the suburbs of the white-flight Rust Belt having lived lives so similar to Trent’s that he could have been them, or they him, had things worked out differently.

  To show how location plays its part, this book also presents histories of three towns. The stories of Mercer and Cleveland suggest how and why Reznor made Pretty Hate Machine, and the story of Youngstown illustrates how I began to make sense of Reznor and his work. Time was also a major factor in this project, not for least because, like most first books, this one took much longer than it was supposed to. As I worked and wrote, between 2006–10, the cities, band, and interviewees’ lives changed dramatically. Most importantly, Nine Inch Nails’ output and Reznor’s personal development was tremendous in the second half of the 2000s, and at some point I decided to locate the book in the late 2000s, just after the announcement that Nine Inch Nails would remain an active project but no longer tour. As of now there are six distinct phases to the NIN story—industrial beginnings, commercial success, the Fragile era, sober productivity, emergence as a digital distro pioneer, and now post-performance project era. This book augments and contextualizes the
time and already existing work on that early period, and shows how the early period shaped later thoughts about the band. I look forward to a comprehensive post-Fragile NIN book, or a Reznor biography to shed light on the innumerable curiosities, connections, and questions this project brought up for me.

  The final chapter of this book traces the work of Nine Inch Nails in the age of mall-goth reproduction through an examination of Nine Inch Nails’ importance for Hot Topic. The first store opened in a California mall around the time when Pretty Hate Machine was released, and NIN became one of Hot Topic’s flagship bands, providing an excellent case study for how the band, its fans, and the shop view the relationship between subcultural or subversive values, and style and the marketplace.

  Many fans are anxious that the sounds they believe to be their soul’s salvation are also a mass-mediated commodity. This issue was expressed most eloquently by a post from brok3nMachine on the (now defunct) official fan webboard The Spiral:

  After joining The Spiral and being choked by these convoluted forums of pages upon pages of NIN-related material, I felt obligated to express my death of individuality … It’s precisely what moved me to express why I think it sucks to be a NIN fan:

  1. You’re a dime a dozen.

  2. Lyrics you found personal and made you feel somewhat unique to comprehend are rather well acknowledged.

  3. Whatever NIN rarity you possess and have great sentimental value toward someone else has ten of them.

  4. In the unlikely event you ever meet The Reznor, what you say will have already been heard a million times over.

  5. Your pride as a NIN fan isn’t what it used to be when you hear someone else has been to more than ten shows when you’ve only been to one.

  6. After listening to NIN for so long, you kind of realize your only real value as a fan is valued in money.

  7. All the cash you spent on merchandise, CDs, concert tickets (and now memberships) is money you could have spent on making a rock star out of yourself.

  8. The only thing you learned from NIN lyrics is that we used to be somebody but now the pain is constant and sharp. So constant there are about 21 halos to detail it.

  9. You’re sometimes stereotyped as some kind of depressive, Satanic lunatic when you’re wearing a NIN shirt.

  10. You can’t stop listening to NIN because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We lament that we’re standard, ordinarily weak people so we sit back and listen to the songs by those we feel we must validate ourselves through. Those who do things we can only dream about.

  Take these thoughts as however they strike you: offensive, humorous, true, whatever. I realize they don’t apply solely to NIN (some do) but I just felt I’d mention them with you perchance to find another individual who finds loneliness amid the crowd.

  So live the contradictions of being a Nine Inch Nails fan. Being in the live crowd was one of the most loaded moments in Nine Inch Nails fandom, when suburban isolation and alienation became mass spectacle. There was a horrible thrill in being among thousands of black-clad people with raised fists singing along. While Trent, his band, the live sound, the light show, and the venues worked to make it a cathartic experience, it was in the performance of individual fans among many that the social distances in daily life collapsed, the asocial gave way. It is through acknowledging the repetition of ourselves and understanding the implications of so much Nine Inch Nails fandom that we become critically conscious people. In the crowd, be it face to face or online, fans could trace similarities, see certain patterns, and talk as community. It is during these moments when Nine Inch Nails fans move from being a trench coat mafia, gazed upon as suspects, to become something like a family.

  This book is a written version of that moment. It looks beyond the skin and stigma to the deep tissue of one kind of American despair.

  The Becoming

  In 1979 Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called “The River,” a story of a teen pregnancy prompting a loveless marriage in which the father works a crummy job whose future is uncertain “on account of the economy.” If you take Pretty Hate Machine as the sound of that child’s growing up, then the album is not a harbinger of the technofuture but the continued articulation of dread felt by a certain kind of man given certain chances.

  Pretty Hate Machine arrived in the final year in office for Ronald Reagan, a fiercely antilabor president whose tax incentives made it easy to close American factories and whose trickle-down economics curbed 1970s inflation while crushing the country’s working people. Reagan’s mantra of personal responsibility focused the blame for lost jobs on workers, and his government cut social programs that could help the newly unemployed, including health care, food stamps, and education. This was the playbook of economic neoliberalism, which would come to be a global strategy to redistribute wealth back to elites.16

  Reagan’s policies drove the U.S. into the postindustrial era at an enormous human cost. Industrial music was one poetic response to this trauma, much like country music was earlier in the history of industrialization. Country rose as a genre at the moment when most Americans had left rural areas for cities, as a kind of modern music about rural, social, and temporal distance. It was a way to understand the lost connection to the land, along with the humiliations heaped onto working-class, mostly white folks trying to make a decent living. Country musicians have defined themselves against the urban, cosmopolitan, and technologically modern world through recordings that emphasize acoustic timbres and rough vocal qualities. Lyrics idealize the rural, celebrate the pride of manual labor and integrity of a promise, and lament the singer’s or others’ actions when they fail to live up to an ideal or “sell out” for the modern.

  Industrial is a postmodern music about the failures of modernity, a genre begun as an avant-garde practice in 1970s England but which grew into a network of underground scenes in fading western industrial cities by the eighties. The dry irony of Throbbing Gristle’s maxim “Industrial music for industrial people” has been interpreted across the globe with different instruments and musical styles, and with varied lyrical approaches. One thing is constant: industrial musicians embrace the technologies of management, the sounds of the shop floor, and flexible, nonlinear production techniques in their critique of power. Their cut-ups, sputtering drum machines, and shreds of harsh noise are the ugly mirrors of pop music’s technological wonderland, while their lyrics literalize the horror of humans being treated as dead machines in pop-Marxist language and production styles that robotize the voice. Like the sci-fi tradition it samples so heavily, industrial posits a central theme: dystopia is already around us, if only we were awake enough to see it.17 The music becomes a way for its listeners to stay sharp, to hear and feel not sorrow for the betrayals that have led to their lost way of life but to see causes, feel rage, and be moved to resistance.

  Nine Inch Nails borrow the sound and style of electro-industrial but reject the overt politics and parody of the subgenre to focus almost exclusively on the personal tragedy of the people and institutions that fail one individual: Trent Reznor. NIN’s lyrics explore the repressions of religion, family, and society, but only as they pertain to one life, sung in almost too-human melodies and without perceivable irony. With Nine Inch Nails, the effects of mechanization are laid bare: the human experience of powerlessness in postmodern, postindustrial life is crystallized by someone screaming in and against an impossible room full of synthesized sensations.

  A generation of young men and women had sympathy for such a sound. Dead-end job, no health care, apocalyptic faith, broken family. They wanted to switch off entirely, but there was one nagging problem: they were still human.

  Crooning melodies and sweet pop hooks were Reznor’s major sonic crimes against 1980s industrial music. Another was this focus on the personal, the absence of real politics. That Reznor subsumed industrial’s clangs, grinds, and warps into pop and sold millions of records only made the case against NIN worse. It is possible to hear Nine Inch Nails as the watering down
and commodification of industrial’s anticapitalist musical subculture, but for the majority of people slumbering through Reagan’s American morning, Nine Inch Nails was a stunning revelation: dissent from the complacence of suburbia was possible, and it could sound so strange.

  Other mainstream alternative bands of the 1990s inspired similar awakenings, but none so bluntly addressed the undersides of religion, power, sexuality, corporeality, and trust as did Nine Inch Nails. Take, for instance, the band’s most famous song, “Closer.” It’s a six-minute pop hit built from the kick of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” with an inhuman metronome, a queer synth hook, and distant distortion that builds into the lyrical confession that only the least human of intimacies is tolerable for he who feels vile, broken, fallen—that only through carnality can he experience something like salvation. After all the hard drums, synths, and lyrics, the song ends with a naive keyboard hook.

  Tenderness and brutality: Reznor has veered between the two throughout Nine Inch Nails’ career. This can be seen best in his approach to the keyboard—in his legato fingertips and in his fist. As a child, Reznor distinguished himself on the piano, and was encouraged by his teacher Rita Beglin to study music for a profession. He showed a fondness for works with long legato lines, such as those of Frédéric Chopin and Erik Satie. Practicing this style of French salon music, he would learn to press a key with constant energy, to linger with patience and release only after the next finger connected. The last key of a phrase in this style is a slow release into nothingness. These scores demand incredibly tender phrasing, as the player’s fingers mimic the breath of an anguished singer. But from the first moment of NIN, Reznor has been beating the hell out of his keyboards. As the stage shows grew larger, more keyboards and guitars joined the heaps that roadies glue together after gigs. His mission was to focus the energy of this European parlor instrument turned tone trigger into an aggressively masculine form of expression. Making synths tough was part of Reznor’s artistic achievement: he dramatizes the expressive qualities of the machine for the purpose of sounding human. The trick of Nine Inch Nails is to make synth-pop sound like hard rock through gesture, distortion, and banks of noise.