Date: ????
Reznor, 31,
records as Nine Inch Nails, a one-man studio act, and has a thriving touring career as
leader of Nine Inch Nails, a quartet that interprets his computerized compositions before
wild fans. He is now nurturing other shock rockers, such as the hard-core horror band
Marilyn Manson. Reznor's work is the stuff of nightmares for virtuecrats like William
Bennett, but Oliver Stone drafted Reznor to write music for Natural Born Killers,
as did David Lynch for his post-noir Lost Highway. Reznor also provides the
background music for Goths, a mostly Generation Y subculture of kids who tend to dress in
black, vampirelike garb and obsess over death and decay.
Reznor's music is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex,
suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy. But to the depressed, his music, veering away
from the heartless core of Industrial, proffers pop's perpetual message of hope--or
therapeutic Schadenfreude: there is worse pain in the world than yours. It is a lesson as
old as Robert Johnson's blues. Reznor wields the muscular power of Industrial rock not
with frat-boy swagger but with a brooding, self-deprecating intelligence. "I had no
expectations of commercial success," he says. "But people 'got it.' That I
didn't expect."