Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral
There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer catches on with the Jim Rose Circus and the Lollapalooza tour because he can take cannonballs in the gut. At some point in that episode, Bart and Lisa are watching some band, I think Smashing Pumpkins, from the crowd and Lisa makes some comment about how, although the music is dark, it certainly was affecting the kids. Bart shrugs and says something like, “Eh, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.”
That sentiment basically sums up my opinion of Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. The lyrics are eye-rollingly bad. I swear I wrote some of these exact same lines a few years prior to this album’s release when I was 17. KEN-penned lyrics include the shouted “I wanna fuck everyone in the world” and “Don’t you tell me how I feel” from “I Do Not Want This” and, from “Hurt,” the whispered:
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
God, no matter how many times I go over that I can’t help but groan. And the histrionics don’t end there. This is the breakthrough NIN album, the one that capitalized on the buzz from Pretty Hate Machine, in part because of its “outrageous” and “controversial” lyrics like “God is dead/And no one cares” from “Heresy” and “I want to fuck you like an animal” from “Closer.” Really, people, are we going to make it this easy? “Fuck you like an animal” is going to be the phrase that causes your outrage that induces the publicity that builds Trent Reznor’s mansions? Good lord. I guarantee you your teenage son wanted to fuck one of his classmates like an animal long before hearing this song.
If you can get through the melodrama, though, and the handful of throwaway tracks here, this is actually pretty good. “March Of The Pigs” uses an odd meter played at speeds that are difficult for most musicians to play in four. “Big Man With A Gun,” despite its sophomoric and juvenile phallic lyics (and you know I always like good lyrics about cock) is a 96-second visceral rampage conveying a violent, unsatisfying orgasm. The last five tracks, as well as “The Becoming,” demonstrate that even when the songwriting doesn’t come together for Reznor, his attention to sonic detail, which creates a three-dimensional, hyper-realistic, cinematic sonic environment that I swear you can see, is enough to keep you listening to repetitive, simplistic compositions.
Reznor is amazingly talented in two areas: combining cool sounds and marketing himself as some kind of anti-authoritarian revolutionary. There are some musicians whose abilities in the either of these categories exceed Reznor’s, but nobody has a higher combined score in the two. Unfortunately, many of his songs suck. There are a number of musicians who make sounds as cool as Reznor and who write great songs. Unfortunately, they’re not as apt to pepper their songs with meaningless melodrama, so they go undiscovered. Nine Inch Nails is fine, but they’re still overrated.
Rating:
Mixers: “The Becoming”
Non-keepers: “Mr. Self Destruct,” “Piggy,” “Heresy,” “I Do Not Want This,” “Eraser”
Filed Between: NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” and Nirvana (Bleach)
Tags: 1994, 3 lunchboxes, CD reviews, J-mez' collection, music
February 4th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
That’s Bad Religion’s problem. I think they’re quite talented musically and their lyrics are pretty insightful, but they just seem so reasonable and stable that they lack sufficient shock value.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
You mean it’s a problem because you’d like them to seem more shocking, or you mean it’s a problem in the sense that they don’t have the popularity or recognition you think they deserve?
February 20th, 2009 at 9:14 am
[...] the better, but it’s worth mentioning that, sound quality issues aside, I think the songs from The Downward Spiral work much better in a live context performed by a full band than they do when performed by only [...]
March 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
[...] has less of those roll-your-eyes moments Trent Reznor is so good at giving us. On the other hand, The Downward Spiral mixes things up better and still has better cohesion. This CD rarely strays from one of two moods, [...]