Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero

PART THREE

Trent Reznor is probably my favorite performer and musician, period. I realize that might be a strange choice to some people, and if you told me I’d said that five years ago, I’d be surprised. Beck crapped out, the Beatles are too universal, David Bowie clearly had a point where he gave up even though I love him, I came to Scott Walker too late, DJ Shadow and the Pixies couldn’t make it past the third album, My Bloody Valentine too hard to pin down, the Wu couldn’t be trusted for quality, neither could Sonic Youth, and Radiohead… well five years ago it would have been Radiohead. Hell, I’d even be up for argument – Radiohead are amazing. If there’s a Beatles of the past 20 years, it’s certainly Radiohead, from the way they process their influences to the way they work to the crazy division of labor in that band. They are smarter than everyone else, they make music that grabs everyone in their head and their soul at the same time. They experiment with format, and have spearheaded massive changes in the way we as a society listen to music. But… Radiohead weren’t the band that kicked me in the face and changed the way I listened to music. One day I was listening to Korn and Limp Bizkit shit on the radio and the next I was blaring “Heresy” and dying my hair black and taping Chris Cunningham videos off the tv. I’m not saying it was healthy, but goddamn if it wasn’t a step in the right direction. I don’t even remember how I got into Nine Inch Nails, to be honest. But that change was so palpable. Without, NIN I don’t buy Odelay, I don’t watch Eraserhead. I come out as a fundamentally different person. But this was late, I was going through this crap older than I should have been – I didn’t really get into music at the right time and when I did it was right in time to get caught up in a whole heap of bullshit. If I hadn’t heard the few bands I heard at this time, I probably wouldn’t have been a music person for much longer. I was a reader, I was kind of starting to be film nerd – but not music. Really, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it. NIN was THAT BAND for me and then Radiohead were the second and then I was a music person.

I kind of thought of it as a gateway band after a while, to be honest.  The Fragile came out in Sept. 99 and Kid A came out in Oct. 00 – in that time I went from being a nu-metal kid to being a music snob. I discovered all this great stuff – from the obvious stuff like the Pixies and Bjork to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emporer to Massive Attack and Primal Scream to Atari Teenage Riot to the Smashing Pumpkins to Mos Def to Aphex Twin to PJ Harvey to the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy. No, Radiohead were a real band and Trent Reznor was a guy who made some records I liked when I was 14. When With Teeth came out six years later I was off that, listening to Gorillaz and Broken Social Scene. I remember a friend of mine (who’s name I don’t remember so… yeah, probably not that good a friend but this was pre-back injury and therefore is hazy) telling me they heard the title track and hated it, going “with-uh teeth-uh”, and me deciding that I should probably skip it and trying and steal some more Ultravisitor-era Squarepusher white labels off the internet.

I was an angry, fucked-up, overweight kid who had just been kicked out of a catholic school and wasn’t dealing with it well, had no friends,  and the facile anger of the stuff I was listening to really wasn’t doing the job. The difference between the angry twelve year old gritted teeth and tears of Korn’s “Kill You” and an album that’s first song has the lyric “TEAR A HOLE EXQUISITE RED FUCK THE REST AND STAB IT DEAD” screeched with religious conviction is night and day. I may have wrote it off as angst at some point, the way most people do – but it’s not just angst. If you lay out all the records that I screamed along with in high school none of them hold up the same way. Rage Against the Machine? Nirvana? Tool? Metallica? It’s all shit for teenagers. There’s no depth to it, musically or emotionally and once you understand that there’s more to music than guitar solos, there has to be something. Even if it’s frivolous crap, there’s got to be something there. But a few year on I had moved on. From a lot of stuff, I had a lot of health issues and had just started writing comics – like when I got into the band, it was a transitional time and I wasn’t really up for NIN anymore. It didn’t help that the intervening years saw Reznor bitching about the way Kid A was sold against The Fragile, the perception of With Teeth as a “safe” album (which is debateable but “Hand That Feeds” didn’t help that image), the shitty song on the Tomb Raider soundtrack,  Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” which kind of invalidated the original for a while, Reznor getting clean – which sounded like a bad idea for a dude who made the kind of music he did. I didn’t buy or steal With Teeth, the most I heard of it was the stuff sampled on 24 Hours. There were a few things – I’d heard that the band was kind of stunning live now, but they already were, and then I heard about the radio sessions he was doing with Tv on the Radio and Peter Murphy. That’s probably where my interests were piqued – there’s a real ease to those sessions. It’s a maturity in a way that’s not Sting-maturity. Reznor wasn’t recording an americana album or hiring Brian Eno or Rick Rubin to fix him, he wasn’t recording in a villa in Spain, going classical or jazz, choosing a cause, allowing his side members to write songs, doing a covers album, becoming a live-only band – none of that. Here he was, touring with legitimately interesting bands (Tvotr, Ladytron) that weren’t obvious. And with the choices of songs he was making, he was understanding (and maybe positioning) himself in a tradition of stuf like The Idiot and Unknown Pleasures. He was recognizing that 15 years into his career if you don’t define these things yourself – maybe the biggest problem with NIN in the 90s is he defined his peers as Helmet, Soundgarden, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson. Reznor is still a valid, current artist and literally no one he was compared with in 89-99 are either around or still worth a damn. He’s the only one who’s not a joke or a casualty. Maybe it’s because he was too singular a person and musician or maybe it’s because he toured with David Bowie and learned a few things.

When Year Zero was released as a free stream on NIN’s site I gave it a chance and was kind of floored. I didn’t know about the ARG or that it was Reznor’s first real “concept album”, or that it was science fiction. I listened because it was free and a few people had mentioned it as being a step up from the previous. Every song shifts perspective, every song ends in a mess of shuddering noise. Reznor’s voice has grown far more expressive in the intervening years, and any and all structure is manipulated to do the exact opposite of what you expected. Its not just smart, it’s smart on every level – be it personal, political, musical, noise, pop, etc. Year Zero was the kind of album I needed to hear at the right time to hear it, just like Deltron was. It’s a musician I loved and understood using a genre I loved and understood to push himself forward. Year Zero is Deltron 3030’s nasty mirror image – where Automator’s production is evocative, Reznor’s is assaultive. Where 3030 is the rap equivalent of Neuromancer, Year Zero instead models itself on Akira – it is a world in collapse seen from every possible angle as it adds up to a picture of a society as a whole. 3030 is single-perspective vignettes and Year Zero is short stories from the pov of mouhtpieces, suicide bombers, religious leaders, the military, the debased. Deltron’s message is at it’s core about how you behave in comparison to the world around you, Year Zero is a warning of the the way the world is headed and the inability of the individual to change it. Where Deltron is reference laden,Year Zero is naturalistic. It is about losing yourself in the din of noise from all sides, and the extremism that results. It’s as important a work of science fiction this decade as Children of Men and Pattern Recognition, saying so much about the culture that produced it while succeeding on personal and artistic levels at the same time. Year Zero kicked my ass, and the next few posts here are going to be about it, and I might go a little overboard in the process. Consider yourself… warned.