Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (14 page)

Within a year of signing to TVT, Reznor moved from Cleveland to New Orleans. Although he slagged the Cleveland scene in early national press, he began nearly all of his Nine Inch Nails tours in the city. Perhaps it was homage to his music’s home, or maybe Cleveland is still the testing ground for a certain kind of middle Euro-American taste. In the nineties, Cleveland’s rock radio market, its “demographic,” was a land of second- and third-generation white-flight Americans, kids who often didn’t know where they came from or how or why they were there.
Pretty Hate Machine
was made from and played straight into their isolation from the cosmopolitan and from their history.

In the nineties, Cleveland called itself Comeback City, with new job creation driving urban construction and a revival of theaters and music clubs downtown. But even then, Cleveland was losing its young and educated to warmer climates and cities that better catered to workers in the knowledge economy. Once the state’s largest city, Cleveland has fallen behind Columbus and Cincinnati and continues to lose population, in what the
Plain Dealer
refers to as the
city’s “Quiet Crisis,”
⁶¹
but from discussions about the city’s schools, sports, economy, politics, and policy, there is an even more common term: the downward spiral.

brok3nMachine, 21, Valencia, Pennsylvania

brok3nMachine was the screen name of a frequent commenter in the fan club The Spiral whose incendiary posts caught my attention. After some online chat, he invited me to his home, where we sat in the living room talking while a troop of bloodhounds yelped in the background.

I live about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh. We used to live where my mom grew up, in Penn Hills, near Pittsburgh. We moved back here so we could go to Mars High School. That school’s 99 percent white, so I think it’s probably the same thing Trent lived with, because western Pennsylvania’s really got no diversity. Penn Hills is different; whites were the minority. I think that’s why my dad moved out of there. It’s gotten more populated here because of Cranberry, and they’re developing that area with a lot of corporate, big-box-type stores.

I think I had a good childhood, probably much like
Trent’s, I’d imagine, but high school was four years of hell. I liked science and stuff like that, but I was a lot more creative, and I don’t feel the school took that seriously. They were really into athletics, science, and math. I wanted to do video-game art design.

I used to go down to talk to my guidance counselor, and she must’ve heard the wrong signals. I was really down, and I think it scared her. I had a bunch of NIN lyrics on a 3½-inch floppy, and I gave it to her and said, “I feel like this.” You know what I mean? I gave her “Closer.” I remember going to the hospital, and I had a NIN T-shirt on. People were like, “This band got you into what you’re in right now,” but I don’t think it was that. Through NIN I found a way to understand what I was going through. I was there for five days, right after September 11. Those were about the five worst days of my life. That’s why I didn’t learn anything about college.

You know, the cover of
Pretty Hate Machine
, I still don’t know what that is. It’s a turbine? I guess that has to say something about a hate machine. The biggest thing that came out of that era was the logo. It’s up there with, like, the AT&T ball in terms of being memorable. A good logo is simple, transferable, and speaks the personality of something. That backward N says something about NIN. You know,
This isn’t just another band. This is something kind of twisted.
The way it comes in like that and focuses on the “I,” that’s strange as well. Maybe it could mean Trent is self-important. It was such a great, simple, brilliant idea. The designer deserves a lot of credit. I love the grunge-period design—how David Carson cut the NIN logo in half was brilliant.

My sister was always playing
PHM
when we moved here in 1994. “Terrible Lie” struck a chord with me. I didn’t really understand the lyrics; I was only 9. My dad listened to Tears
for Fears, Howard Jones, and Culture Club. All the eighties songs with synths appealed to me. NIN was like that, but harder. My sister gave me
PHM
, so I started listening to that voraciously, and I stole
The Downward Spiral
from her. And after
The Fragile
, I was 14 and I remember thinking, I love it; I totally get what Trent was going for.

I don’t know when I made the connection with the lyrics. It had to be in high school, when I started getting really depressed. I didn’t have a social life. I still don’t. “Something I Can Never Have” gets me: I’m always trying to achieve something, and there’s always something out there … I want to affect people the way Trent does. He talks about his concerts: he doesn’t want you to get up and take a leak; he wants you to stay there.

I’ve heard that “Something I Can Never Have” is about cocaine or crack.
⁶²
It’s not about drugs for me; it’s girls, because that was a problem. That song was the first of the slow, agonizing, and precisely written NIN songs. “That’s What I Get” is a good song about women. “Maybe it didn’t mean that much, but it meant everything to me” is the epitome of sensitivity that’s been stepped on. The way the song goes quiet after that is great; it adds to the time you can reflect on the lyrics.

I just read
Heart of Darkness
a couple of months ago, and it got me to doubt things like the whole idea of efficiency. Is our goal so noble and perfect? Trent’s become a lot more cultural than I’ve ever seen him, especially when he’s talking about New Orleans. When he spoke about Katrina, I rolled my eyes. But I watched that documentary from Spike Lee that Trent told everybody to watch, and it made sense. I never really thought about it, but that could’ve been me down there. Or what if something happened up here, and the government didn’t respond? Before, Trent seemed to really
hate people. He’s made so much sense to me that for him to do something irrational, it’d be like me doing something against my own principles. I’ve matured and maybe he’s matured, or he’s given up that chronic dissatisfaction and moved on. I didn’t follow politics until I joined The Spiral. People post articles on why fans should be aware about things. Those guys make a lot of sense sometimes.

I’ve always had this way of thinking … that I don’t want to be intimidated by intelligent women. On
PHM
, Trent talks in a way that seems like he feels inferior and that women are dominating, especially with the lyric, “As she walked me through the nicest parts of hell.” A woman is being a torment. Trent views them as a necessity, but he doesn’t really want them. Like in “Kinda I Want To”: “There’s a devil sleeping in my bed.” On “Reptile,” “Eraser,” “Big Man With a Gun,” “Closer”—these are all songs where he doesn’t talk about women as being something enjoyable. Songs like “The Fragile” show a more tender side, as he’s found some person who’s likable, but I can totally relate to what he says about them otherwise.

I was misogynistic for a long time. I remember trying to write an essay on it, trying to describe why I hated women, trying to be real reasonable and sensitive about it. By the end, I thought, This has a lot of holes in it, and it’s prejudiced, blind, and irrational, so that’s why I’ve kind of come off it. Now I see it’s my fault that they don’t talk to me or I don’t talk to them. It’s fear. Like, I’d be reading at school near an interior-design room. The things I’d overhear from there from the girls were enough to make me never want to talk to another girl again. They’re ripping down people when they’re not there. That’s been a huge fear of mine, and a reason for my perfectionism.

When I joined The Spiral, that was my biggest moment
of fandom, because I had all the albums, I collected everything, I had just seen Trent in Erie. I started a thread, and it just took off from there. So many people were like me. Well, actually, they weren’t like me. They appeared to like the loudness, like on
Broken
. But I felt attracted to these people. They were fun and extroverted. I like the soft stuff. “Leaving Hope” is my favorite song. Trent’s a lot angrier than I am, I guess. “You Know What You Are” and “The Hand That Feeds” are really seething songs. I can be pissed off sometimes and relate to that mood, but now I’m calm, so I’m thinking about “A Warm Place.”

During a recent Spiral chat with Trent and the band, I was asking too personal of questions, and Trent didn’t reply. But the other band members were making assholes out of themselves. It was a side of NIN I didn’t know existed. I mean, I hated Blink-182. All my friends were into them, and it drove me insane, because they weren’t sensitive, thinking, mature people. With NIN, it’s like the other end of the spectrum. But when I saw NIN act like Blink-182, it was like, What the hell?

The music’s an invariable thing, but the band members … I never liked the band members. All I cared about was Trent. Same with Joy Division; all I cared about was Ian Curtis. New Order, not really. They’re nowhere near Joy Division, in terms of postmodern musicians with incredible lyrics. I don’t think Trent is postmodern, to tell you the truth. He’s not a poet, unfortunately. He has really basic lyrics. His most poetic song is “Somewhat Damaged,” because he goes off from how he normally writes. It’s rich with visuals and doesn’t really have any refrains. He generally has too many refrains; he’s becoming more pop. He doesn’t have too much room for a listener’s subjectivity in his art. It’s probably in his personality. He seems like a perfectionist, a control freak.

With Teeth
sounds like
PHM
Part IV, because the lyrics seem shallow. I get the feeling that Trent’s doing all this just to fund his retirement. But it’s not a product; it’s his art. He hasn’t been like, I guess I’m going to make another
TDS
to bring back all the people who were fans of that album.

With the fan club, it’s like, Let’s spend money to talk about how awesome T is. People talk about him on the boards like, Trent, you’re God. I’m not like that. I only want to meet people who are like me. It’s something that’s human, to want to find someone who thinks like yourself. But I do feel genuine with my membership. Sometimes I wish I had spent all the money that I did on NIN stuff on art supplies for myself.

In my room, I have NIN over here, I have my PC games right here, and Clive Barker stuff there. It is like an altar. Sometimes I need to shut off all the stimulation around me and just focus on the music, like “Leaving Hope.” I’ve listened to that song so many times. Like on Friday nights: I’d get really depressed, and I’d throw on the slower songs and lose myself in that. I refuse to go on antidepressants now, because it destroys my creativity. Before, when I was on antidepressants and listening to music, I couldn’t feel that parallel toward it. When I wasn’t depressed, I didn’t know what to do; I was just sitting there and the music wasn’t making any sense.

I’ve found a lot of safety in music. I talk about NIN being a self-fulfilling prophecy … now I listen to NIN out of habit more than for understanding and coping. Sometimes I think, Why would I listen to NIN when I’m in a pretty good mood right now?

Anonymous, 35, between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio

This fan published an eloquent, personal review of the 2006 Blossom NIN concert, and I reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to share even more of his history with the band. We met at a coffee shop in Akron, which helped locate us in space as he pointed to bars in his past, his work up in Cleveland, and his hometown south of Akron.

I grew up in a little town called Uniontown. Literally, it had one stoplight. It combined with the next town over for high school, and we had 300 kids in my graduating class, in 1989. It’s an Amish community. My wife grew up in Richfield, and her frame of reference was Akron. Like when they would go to a mall, it was Akron’s Summit Mall, whereas my frame of reference was North Canton. That’s where people’s parents worked, at places like Diebold and the Hoover Co.

Cleveland is your backyard when you live in northeastern
Ohio. It was an intimidating place. It didn’t seem safe, you know? It was the eighties, and it was a big city dying. There was no reason to go there. It wasn’t like that was where the department stores were for the holidays, like in previous generations.

I’ve worked in downtown Cleveland for seven years, and many of my coworkers make the commute like I do, about 40 minutes. Tax- and school-district wise, it is better here. After five years, I started looking for something closer to home. I looked for a good three or four months, and I had offers, but nobody could touch what Cleveland pays.

Growing up, I was always listening to Top 40 stuff. Whatever my older sister was listening to, that was fine. My good friend had older brothers who liked The Who and Oingo Boingo, so I started listening to that, went through the hair band/heavy metal phase in middle school, then found the alternative scene. It was then that I found my voice as a writer, and I immersed myself in the music and lifestyle of mid to late eighties alternative. I was into things like The Cure, Depeche Mode, those morose songs and albums like The The’s
Mind Bomb
. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that album, I was like, Damn, I wrote this! There was such a connection with the things Matt Johnson was singing about: very sexual and violent and messed-up.

I was listening to
PHM
today on the drive home. I almost wish the album had never been released. The first time I heard a NIN song on the radio, I was just like, Fuck! Other people are going to hear this and they’re gonna claim it as their own. I have to go to this dive bar in Akron to hear this music. Why am I hearing it on the radio?
PHM
was so personal to me, and it felt cheapened because it was reap-propriated for frat boys. I remember thinking the same thing when I saw “Everybody Hurts” on MTV.

I worked at this place called the Warehouse Club, and that’s where I began to scratch below the surface. I had this expanding circle of friends from the next town over. My school friends were a motley bunch. They never batted an eye when I showed up with dyed hair, a shaved head. I was the whole “tortured artist” finding my voice in writing. I hated high school and was always going to leave and never come back.