trent reznor

We’re In This Together Now

  • Reading time:5 mins read

When Trent Reznor sings “you,” in most cases he’s talking to the other part of himself—call him, Mr. Self Destruct. After Reznor’s own downward spiral that bottomed with a near-death experience on his Fragile tour, his 2005 album With Teeth is largely about recovery. 2013’s Hesitation Marks is about that battle’s return after an age, his musical avatar’s id reasserting itself and the struggle for control resuming with a little more self-awareness this time around.

With Teeth in particular is to me one of Reznor’s most fascinating albums. The whole thing exists in this dazed, sober limbo where Reznor seems to gaze around him, notice how much time has passed, and wonder exactly how he might function as a real person after he’s missed so much along the way.

“Only” (2005, With Teeth)

As fatuous as “Only” may be—the subsumed comedy to so many NIN songs a right up front this time—it’s also weirdly affirming as a recovery anthem. The music holds this uneven smirk while Reznor asserts that, no, that person doesn’t exist; it’s only him now. It almost needs to be as silly as it is, to undercut the drama of the old persona that he means to peel away. “No,” the song says. “You don’t get control here. I’m allowed to mock you.”

The chunky 2/4 backing serves as a loopy funhouse mirror of “Closer.” The lyrics quote “Down In It,” then twist the lyric into a reflection on his behaviors that led him to this point. Musically, Reznor seems to be taking a step back and going, “Yeah, that… that whole era of my life was pretty absurd, huh. Christ, that wasn’t me; that was never even a real person. I can’t let that affect me anymore. Well, I’m here now. It’s okay. I’m fine. I guess.”

You take Reznor’s (character’s) sort of ongoing dialogue with the other unwanted aspect of himself, and pair it with his curiously persistent themes of transformation or becoming—when I say that NIN often feels really super transy to me, this is what I mean. It’s a starting point, anyway.

“Everything” (2013, Hesitation Marks)

That concept to “Only” sort of comes back eight years later in “Everything.” This time, though, there’s a dark undertone. The assertion here—I survived everything—it’s less triumphant than it sounds. There’s a shade of denial; of pushing down that unwanted persona away as it threatens to bubble back to control—pretending it’s gone while it sits, waits.

You never really recover from mental illness or addiction, right. That’s not how it works. You just learn how to cope and manage better. The scars will always be a part of you, lurking as part of your base code. Being so incautious as to say, ha ha, I’m better now; it’s fine—you’re setting yourself up for problems.

There’s this interesting sequence to Reznor’s albums. His big opus that he’ll never live down is of course 1994’s The Downward Spiral. And that’s both the anchor and the weight that affects everything in its wake. That album has at least three direct sequels: first comes 1990’s The Fragile, then With Teeth and Hesitation Marks—each replacing the previous one and telling a slightly different story. The “Downward Spiral” theme from throughout that album keeps reemerging in odd, distorted forms as Reznor tries to escape its shadow—the seeming implication in Hesitation Marks being, for all his growth and change, he will never escape either that legacy or the damage that its story represents. There’s a part of him that will always be Mr. Self Destruct.

That push for recovery, it starts as early as “The Fragile”—weakly, helplessly, almost as a plea, as the album traces its own roller coaster of emotion. “We’re In This Together” strikes me as a particularly curious read, when you take what I say about Reznor and “you.”

“We’re In This Together” (1999, The Fragile)

Once you accept that most of Reznor’s music is about his own mental health struggles, in particular his relationship with his self—and then once you notice how very transy how much of his music feels, one gets some kind of a vibe from lyrics like “You’re the queen and i’m the king/Nothing else means anything.”

None of this of course is to impose any particular reading on Reznor himself as a person. Whatever his deal is, it’s his own deal. I’m not his therapist; I’m not in his head (thank God). I have no interest in projecting anything on a real person. I’m just noticing the way that his art hangs together, and how well it lends itself to reflect a certain set of ideas that… I guess always made an unspoken sense to me.

While I’m Still Here

  • Reading time:5 mins read
Since 2005 Nine Inch Nails has been a discussion between two characters: the man who Trent Reznor feels he is deep inside, or who he once was, or very much wants to be; and the man who he became in the 1990s. For the sake of discussion, let’s call them True Trent and Demon Trent.

His work of the last decade is a patchwork of self-rediscovery. Gone are the meticulous soundscapes and concept albums (Year Zero aside), and with them departs the familiar “Trent Reznor” character, the protagonist of self-destructive operas like The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. In their place we have a mix of baffled confessional and therapy, and outward-looking projects like Year Zero and Ghosts.

Though the latter are interesting, it’s in the former that the core Nine Inch Nails narrative — by which I mean Reznor’s endless introspection — continues. To that end, let’s narrow our focus to With Teeth and The Slip.

On these albums, generally True Trent assumes the role of narrator. In songs like “Every Day Is Exactly The Same” and “Echoplex” he deals with the boredom and creeping emptiness of a sober life. While he spent a decade in a bottle, his world had moved on and left him behind. Come 2005 he was out of the darkness, older on the outside. Inside, though, where there should have been years of growth and wisdom and personal experiences, there was just a fuzzy emotional void — the space where his demon had sat, and the open portal through which it could, at any time, return.

Notice here the use of pronouns. If in these songs there is a “you”, chances are that it refers to Demon Trent. At times the switch flips, and Demon Trent takes charge of “I”, with True Trent demoted to “you”. Depending on the song this interplay can be playful, or earnest, or frustrated, or defeated. The discussion is possibly at is most obvious in “Only”, itself a dry parody, or 2005 revamp, of “Down In It”:

I just made you up to hurt myself, yeah
And I just made you up to hurt myself
And it worked.
Yes it did!

There is no you
There is only me
There is no you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me

It is in this context that Hesitation Marks operates as an album. Take the character from The Downward Spiral and The Fragile (with his accordingly lavish soundscape), and filter him through the themes of With Teeth, and you have the basic story.

The album began as a pair of tracks — the initially-baffling “Everything”, and the hip-hop influenced “Satellite” — for a long-delayed “best of” record; according to Reznor, everything else grew out of that material. If you consider the basic discussion of modern-day Nine Inch Nails, that totally makes sense.

“Everything” is a cry of incautious, (as Reznor put it) arrogant victory. “I survived everything”, he sings in the verse. “Wave goodbye / wish me well / I’ve become something else”. But then the strange, dissonant chorus hits — and under all the noise we get a different story. “But this thing that lives inside of me / will surely rise and wake”.

This is the nature of addiction, especially over as long a period as Reznor suffered; it never leaves you, and in its absence one needs an exhausting, constant vigilance. Let down your guard for a moment, and you relapse, and you’re back where you started.

Indeed, after that show of arrogance, in the very next track Reznor switches characters:

satellite
I’m watching you
I’m one step ahead
satellite
I’m part of you
I’m inside your head

This interplay forms the basic story of the album. Years later, the man from those earlier albums returns. He makes an earnest effort to shed his demons and reclaim ownership over himself. For a while he seems to make progress. Yet what he fails to understand is that his demons will never, ever go away. He will never win, not entirely. If he chooses to fight, then the fight will be forever.

I’ve got to let it go
I’ve got to get straight
why’d you have to make it so hard
let me get away

One of the intriguing and frustrating elements is that it can be very difficult to tell who is speaking any given line. Some songs seem to be a call and response between the two Trents, while others are entirely one or the other. As part of this structure there is actually a little sympathy for Demon Trent. He’s just doing what he does, and doesn’t totally understand why True Trent is rejecting him.

There are some ups and downs. “All Time Low” seems to be about Demon Trent’s attempts to seduce Real Trent. “In Two” is about a drastic measure that Real Trent takes to cleanse himself. In the end it is unclear quite what happens. It appears that our man’s energy runs out, and he is unable to maintain the fight — though which man can we assume is speaking?

Only thing I’ve ever done
Closest I have ever come
Oh so tired on my own
Best days I have ever known

Apparently as he sings “the world” ends… and as it burns he continues to hang on, watching, reflecting.

well I don’t mind
I’m ok
wish it didn’t have to end this way

As the world roars and fades into oblivion, we hear someone honking playfully on a baritone sax. If the voice we’re listening to is True Trent, the sense that we get is, well, at least he tried. If this is goodbye, then it is a gentle one. He understands the situation and what he’s up against, and for all of his regrets he has accepted defeat. At least, for now.

The Only Time

  • Reading time:3 mins read
I’ve gone over this before; the remastered Pretty Hate Machine is nice, if a little underwhelming after the special edition of The Downward Spiral. The lack of any special content aside from NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love” (previously available on the “Sin” single) is a little disappointing, but would be fine if the new mix were a clear improvement. The problem is that although its tracks are a little clearer than before, perhaps EQed a little better, the 2010 album comes from the twenty-first century school of mastering — which is to say, “louder is better“. Everything is compressed to the upper registers, so we lose all of the old dynamic range and the vocal tracks are now often overwhelmed by the backing.

This is unfortunate, and you’d think that Trent Reznor would know better, but it’s sort of a fact of modern studio engineering. Whatever. What I’m noticing, which I have noticed before but I’m noticing again now, is the peculiar effect of this new mastering — which is to say, the better tracks get noisy and hard to listen to, but the weaker tracks — some of them runners up for Trent Reznor’s worst ever — come out much improved. And the damnedest thing is that it’s hard for me to narrow down why.

“The Only Time” should by all reasonable extremes be the worst song on the album — except its misjudged weirdness elevates it beyond “That’s What I Get”. Now? I… kind of like it. It’s certainly easier on the ears than most of the album, and now its weirdness has a certain charm that it lacked. Again, I don’t know what’s different aside from the compressed dynamic range. It’s hard to do an A/B comparison. It’s still a stupid song, but it has become enjoyably dumb.

“That’s What I Get” will forever be Reznor’s most pointless album track, but again it lives a little more than before — as does “Ringfinger”, which to my ear will always be a limp reworking of his perhaps too-saucy-for-1989 “Twist”.

I have always thought that the mixes on Pretty Hate Machine were the most anemic of all known versions of those songs. The single mix of “Sin” is so much richer, so much better in every way — as are most of the early mixes of “Down In It”, “Sanctified”, and the joyously vague “Kinda I Want To”, which in a discussion with our Amandeep Jutla I once paraphrased as “I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!” In order to make all of this material sit together and sound sufficiently gloomy, someone knocked off most of the individual edges.

This may in part explain why I’m not too bothered by the new master. The songs that it degrades mostly sound better elsewhere, and the songs that it improves have never sounded so good.

Also, the packaging.