33 rebellions per minute
"As she walked me through the nicer parts of hell"
1994
Nine Inch Nails, THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Though easy to underestimate--- over-imitated, over-associated with the disco hit "Closer", too much white
noise, crappy worldview--- DOWNWARD SPIRAL is an incredible musical achievement, easily one of my
candidates for most impressive album of all time. First, though NIN's Trent Reznor didn't invent industrial
music (Foetus, Ministry, and Skinny Puppy being the most celebrated founders), he creates more orignal
sounds with more subtly layered effect than anybody I know of, any genre.
Secondly, DOWNWARD
SPIRAL is carefully constructed as an album, as sophisticatedly paced as any hour-plus symphony by any
of the Masterpieces Of Music class subjects. "Mr. Self-Destruct"'s soft tinkling opening runs into sheets of
noise with pounding bass and a buried arcade-gamey celebratory tune in the chorus of what otherwise is
frantic monotone, with a pure-noise ending that flows into the whispered jazzy "Piggy", where the quiet
percussion becomes increasingly spliced and chaotic, setting up the authoritative 4/4 dance tune "Heresy"
and the buzzy New Wave dance intro to "March Of The Pigs", a nicely off-balance song with abrupt
transitions into early-Cure-like doom-pop and bright piano, then back to buzzy New Wave to repeat the
cycle. The final piano bleeds into the proudly synthetic drumbeat opening of "Closer", a song which fades
slowly out as the theme from track 14 ("the Downward Spiral") makes its first appearance, connecting to a
beat like a rusty swingset over which the opening keyboard 16th-notes of "Ruiner" emerge. "Ruiner"'s coda
reprises "Piggy"'s jaunty tagline ("Nothing can stop me now, cuz I don't care anymore") in new desperate
form over a synth-line cribbed from "Terrible Lie" on Reznor's _previous_ LP. Another wash of soft noise
connects the fade of that to the acoustic strums opening "the Becoming" (whose opening melody patches
together the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" and Alice In Chains's "Dirt", which I'd mind if it wasn't so
inspired).
Then comes the scariest track, "I Do Not Want This", often nothing but thin layers of chaotic
percussion plus Trent's endlessly reprocessed (or, even scarier, bare and whimpering, not to mention the
low spoken "And maybe this is a cry for help") voice, the final scream of which, in a good piece of
judgment, is immediately followed by a self-parodic joke song ("Big Man With A Gun") and a lovely
instrumental ("a warm place"). "Eraser" starts softly and prettily itself and slowly accelerates into an
aggressiveness that overlaps melodic and stylistic themes with follower "Reptile". It drops volume into the
scary cricket-ambienced title track. The final song "Hurt" allows a pause before its direct, apologetic,
self-disgusted words kick in, but still flows nicely in continuing "Downward Spiral"'s quiet song/ quiet
noise combo, and plays like exit music until making the real exit with two jolting chords, the last of which is
held for an artfully-toyed-with 10-minute drone.
Thirdly, Trent writes very good pop tunes, which ain't so bloody easy y'know; embedded in odd
sounds, they become more fun on replay in your head than on the stereo, as you can mentally remix while
you sing, adjusting the volume of your preferred effect, noticing things 2 days later that had floated past in
the haze of actual listening. And four, though he's erratic, he sometimes writes awfully effective lyrics.
_Read_ "Closer", not just the MTV hook "I wanna ff kyou like an animal"; it's poetry, original and concise
expression, although I'm glad my conception of love is nothing at all like his. More impressive still is
"Eraser", summarizing decades' worth of lyrics from other well known songwriters in just 24 words: "Need
you, dream you, find you, taste you. Fuck you, use you, scar you, break you. Lose me. Hate me. Smash
me. Erase me".
Then there's the catchphrases: "Don't you tell me how I feel!" "God is dead and no-one
cares!" (stolen, I believe, from Book Of Virtues compiler William Bennett). There's an admirable ambition
buried somewhere in "I want to know everything. I want to go everywhere. I want to fuck everyone in the
world, I want to do something that matters!". There's a certain social awareness to "Step right up! March!
Push! Crawl right up on your knees! Please! Greed! Feed! (no time to hesitate) Don't like the look of it,
don't like the taste of it, don't like the smell of it, I wanna watch it come down!". And Gravity Kills or
Stabbing Westward will never even approach the childlike wonder of "He couldn't believe how easy it was.
He put the gun to his face: bang! So much blood for such a little hole. Problems have solutions". It's still
just as well that he proves he can lighten the tone when he chooses; Reznor by all accounts is a kind,
generous man, and it's not really all that surprising. Scary mofo regardless...
1999
Nine Inch Nails, THE FRAGILE
First the bad news, and second and third too: Trent Reznor completely ran out of vocal melodies. He's still deeply depressed for no compelling reason. And he's repeating his old tricks, when any real fan of electronic music knows he should've been learning from the spastic polyrhythmic wizardry of Autechre and Squarepusher, which I think would indeed have been cool, since it would've been a perfect excuse to continue not buying Autechre and Squarepusher albums (don't I spend enough money just on people who bother to write songs? Perhaps not; sigh). Take these in order:
1) No vocal melodies, unless you count the re-use of "Hurt" on "the Great Below". An exaggeration, but barely. In some sense this problem is easy to overstate: Reznor has dozens of instrument voices going on at any given time, and somewhere a tune is usually being carried by a cello, or a dying piano, or a banjo that's taken lessons from a talking drum. Still, few people will come out of THE FRAGILE humming. That matters to me, because it's a severe underperformance. It is my honest conviction that if THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL had been nothing but Trent's non-effect-pedaled voice and a choice of piano or acoustic guitar, it would still have been a masterpiece; a pop masterpiece. The man can sing. He has a conventionally nice voice, an accurate and gentle tenor that's masculine in an understated way, rising convincingly only for strangulation and panic. On THE FRAGILE it's always either husky and worn-out, or screeching, or mutated through a dozen processors. He has a couple of neat new tricks if you're listening closely: one line in "Please" (half of it "Yeah yeah yeah yeah") with the sarcastic, oddly rapid-fired John Wayne drawl of the Fall's Mark E. Smith; one verse of "Starfuckers, Inc." delivered, apparently through an air-conditioning vent, with the jumpy sliced-syllable cadence of the phone company's answering machines. For 110 minutes over two CD's, that's not much.
2) Whine whine whine. There are writers in the world who change themes and main ideas repeatedly over time; they're few, and I admit I'm not one of them. There are other writers, much more numerous, who practice saying the same things over and over, but improve, refining their views and their style and their observational skills. Trent is in neither category. He can still issue a sharp line here and there. I love (and don't entirely rule out as unrealistic) the malicious, whimsical paranoia of "the clouds will part and the sky crack open/ and God himself will reach his fucking arm through/ just to push you down/ just to hold you down". Its preceding chant, "didn't turn out the way you wanted it to/ didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?" has the simplicity of any great line that cuts to the heart of a problem as impolitely as possible. "Where Is Everybody?" manages to convey genuine sadness, and its mantra of "pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding/ where is everybody?/ trying and lying, defying, denying, crying and dying" works wonders out loud, for me. It probably even deserves some credit for writerly insight, as he correctly noted that "weeding and seeding, bird-feeding and reading" wouldn't convey the mood nearly as well (he also avoided the trap of picking "conceding", too passive to fit the flow, although "succeeding" would've been an interesting addition to the list). And I fear he's hit introspective insight on "in a dream I'm a different me/ with a perfect you, we fit together perfectly/ and for once in my life I feel complete/ and still I want to ruin it".
Unfortunately, Trent is so unwilling to ever add detail - events, people, nuanced emotions - that to fill up space he resorts to random ugliness. "Tear a hole exquisite red/ fuck the rest and stab it dead"… "so many dirty little places in your filthy little worn out broken down see through soul"… "the flowers of naivete buried in a layer of frost"… "I am every fucking thing and a little bit more/ I sold my soul but don't you dare call me a whore". I love that the last line of "Starfuckers…" is "you're so vain/ I bet you think this song is about you", and would be immensely curious what percentage of NIN concert-goers could identify the line's original author (maybe 98%; I don't know), but the rest of the song can't do subtler than "my god pouts on the cover of a magazine". I can also imagine a song in which a bridge verse of "just for the record/ just so you know/ I did not believe that you could sink so low" would be devastating; "No You Don't", characterizing its target as a bloodsucking vampire, is not that song. Of course he thought you could sink so low.
I suspect Reznor's lyric-writing style is deliberate, that he's aiming for universality, which details would mar. I think he's wrong in that assumption. As a you-and-me-against-the-world sentiment, "well they've got to kill what they've found" means less to me than Peter Blegvad's "they're torturing our servants by the light of an armored car", although I have no servants. "She shines in a world full of ugliness" reaches me less than Robyn Hitchcock's "when she walks, the floorboards squeak and moan and dream of her", although my house has no floorboards. Give us humans credit for imagination, Trent; we're happy to adopt the details of your reality, if you make it worth our while. If there are no details, take Prozac.
3) The vocal songs on THE FRAGILE -- 17 of the 23 tracks -- are largely in generic midtempo 4/4. The beat is a good one, oh yeah: no bestselling artist in the world has more talent with a drum-machine (or, more accurately, Pro Tools) than Trent does, the dynamics lose very little of their oomph by being predictable, and his vocals may not be tuneful but, multitracked, they spiral and interweave and bounce off each other in dizzying glory. Still, part of why "the Becoming" was my favorite song on DOWNWARD SPIRAL - and was so long before I noticed its time signature - was the glorious unsteady propulsion of its six-then-five-beat measures, settling into a ¾ sway (but never 4/4) on its gentler chorus. "March of the Pigs"'s adrenalized tumble was speeded along greatly by its being too hasty to fit a steadying 8th beat; "Piggy"s woozy disorientation came precisely from the die-roll choppiness of the rhythm's emphasis. Most listeners don't have my tendency to count beats, but the physical response is ingrained: sets of two or four have all the comfort of walking; fragments and elongations work like broken, or extra, legs we haven't gotten the hang of yet. "Just Like You Imagined" -- a piano and metal guitar and drum and buzz and synthetic wobble/gurgle instrumental on disc one -- forces a 10/8 beat illogically, and is much more disorienting than "the Fragile", which would be funky in 6/4 but has an extra couple of beats dropped in, awkwardly, to fit the predestined pacing. Isn't a band called "Nine Inch Nails" supposed to disorient, at the very least?
In that question, slowly, came my answer. Only, to be honest, after watching my own reactions: the slowly developing fact, only partly explainable by album length, that I'm probably listening more to THE FRAGILE than to any other album I've bought this year. It's the first album I grab while I wait for the Ibuprofen/ aspirin cocktail to relieve my migraine; it's one of the albums I choose when I'm yawning too painfully to sleep but can't keep my eyes open. THE FRAGILE is comforting. The pace is mostly static, and sure, I do appreciate the occasional eccentricities like how the percussion loop on "I'm Looking Forward To Joining You, Finally", which could've been created by whacking the exposed infrastructure of a condemned house, systematically (rigidly!) jumps between a square and a syncopated beat. But static works because the beat is not the point; it's loud, it's harsh, but it's ambient, and its predictably drapes warmly over one like a blanket, which I also tend to use at the moments this album attaches to. To say "Where..." doesn't work because its cycling bass drive is just off the leftovers shelf of "Head Like A Hole" and "Sin" is like saying Alicia Silverstone's not cute because other people already had backbones much like hers a decade before she was born. Around the churn -- and indeed, if you listen, in the churn's construction -- are a gazillion little details; of endless interplay between classical instruments, stun guitar and its quiet variants, two different interpretations of crickets at night, two different recyclings of the "Downward Spiral" theme, and God knows what else.The sonic creativity is conservative -- except for disc one's concluding groove that sounds like a Bjork/ Midnight Oil soundtrack collaberation, anything here would fit on his earlier albums. But DOWNWARD SPIRAL claimed so much territory that even three CDs aren't nearly enough to exhaust the ways N.I.N. can construct and combine their endless layers of sound.
When I warned a friend against this album, a few weeks ago, I claimed that it scored about a 2 out of 10 on songwriting, a 10 on production. My assumption, clearly, was that I should average these, come up with "6", and assign it a C+ and a polite filing away; thank goodness my subconscious was smarter. So Trent can't make me feel what he feels; fine, I'd rather think about what I don't feel than about whether my skull is throbbing and my jaw aching. So Trent isn't writing anything I want to sing along to; fine, I'm too tired to sing, and anyway I need to concentrate on sounds, all these wonderful sounds. Not all the songs are equal in my eyes, and this could've been one stupendous 65-minute disc instead of two merely fascinating shorter ones, but even that would be pointless. Reznor panders, at times, but he nonetheless composes, and these are albums in the most refined and deliberate and structured sense. When he gives the one-damn-thing-after-another school of song structure an instrumental as gemlike, as platonically flawless and _flowing_ as Saint Etienne's "Stoned To Say The Least" was for interlocking math logic, he can call it "Ripe (with decay)" for all I care. It fascinates me. Fascination is, for now, an active and educational variant on numbness. Numbness is, for now, happiness. I _am_ happy. If the guy who invented Ibuprofen was a rock star, I'd give him album-of-the-year every time. I hope Trent finds something as good for him.
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