Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (19 page)

A month after Nine Inch Nails’ purported “Goodbye” tour, there was one contemporary T-shirt and one sticker available for the band on Hot Topic’s website. The world NIN created has now grown up, has gone dinosaur or off-trend, or is simply an underground mass of people who no longer need to go to the mall to find the music, one another, and themselves. Hot Topic has found its new market in abstinence-only vampirism. Nine Inch Nails is on hold.
And Trent Reznor is married, a father, and living happily ever after.

So ends 20 years of pretty hate machines.

I am grateful to my interview subjects for sharing their time and their lives with me. Your passion and dedication kept me going with this project. I truly believe that yours are the stories that needed to be told, and I thank you for telling them to me with such courage. I’d also like to thank all the people I met and interviewed in my travels between Mercer, Youngstown, and Cleveland: Tom Lash, Bill Philson, Steve VanWoert, Marky Ray, Carlo Wolff, Jim Benson, the folks at the Mercer County Historical Society, and the librarians at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor.

In preparation of the book Elisabeth Donnelly helped me greatly with transcriptions of the oral histories, and Courtney Harris’s copyediting was invaluable. Thanks ladies! I thank the extremely talented Scott Gursky (
www.scottgursky.com
) for yet another fine bit of cartography. David Barker at Continuum deserves thanks for his amazing patience with me on the project. The 33 1/3 series is a shelter for music writers in this moment of publishing mayhem. Thank you
for fighting to keep it going, and for publishing so many great books.

At various points during the research for this project I consulted with, and thank for their wisdom: Mica Hilson (the synth-pop intellectual), Kerri Mason, Jessica Robertson, Rob Harvilla, Aaron Johnson, Laina Dawes, Elizabeth Keenan, Ann Powers, and my mom and dad. An early version of “The Leader of the Black Parade” was used at the 2007 Experience Music Project Pop Conference, and I thank Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers for their ongoing work on the conference. I would also like to thank Dr. Tom Porcello, whose course on music and technology was an inspiration for “The Becoming.” I am grateful to those who read drafts of the book and made insightful comments: Sarah Dougher, Amy Phillips, J. Gabriel Boylan, Simón Calle, Elizabeth Keenan, Christina Hatcher, Keith Jones, Molly Sheridan, Kerri Mason, Tim Quirk, Anna Stirr, and Toby Carroll. And finally for support in beginning, working on, and finishing this project I would especially like to thank Caleb Waldorf, Kerri Mason, Martin H
ů
la, Petr Klou
č
ek, Neil Sweeney, GirlGroup, and Daphne Brooks, and thank again Tim, Gabe, Ann, and Amy. Much praise to you, my patient and ever-supportive friends. Thank you to Davin Kuntze for enchanting the commodity with design wisdom and book-binding skills, used in the small batch, hand-bound edition of this book. I am grateful to my mom for letting me set up shop back home for the research period of the book, and to my great friends from my Youngstown days, especially Molly Sheridan, John Callery, Randy Rafoth, Tanky Hagg, Nicole Rhody, Mario Pecchia, Isaac Potoczny-Jones, and the BHS trench coat mafia and its mid-nineties house band, Grey Larry. You guys showed me that the local scene mattered most, and were always in my mind in the writing of this
book. Also Carolyn Kukura, Jack Hay, Edie Davidson, and Carol Clark deserve my warmest thanks. Good teachers like you gave weirdo kids like us the feedback, direction, and inspiration we needed to become successful, creative, and professional adults. And then there are others, well … you know who you are.

I want to give heaps of praise to the NIN fan community for its diligent maintenance of the band’s archive. Thanks to ninhotline.net, ninwiki.com, burningsouls.com, 9inchnails.com, ninremixes.com, and to Echoing the Sound and nin.com/The Spiral for making it possible to find esoteric facts, ask odd questions, and find great debate about the band’s history, influence, and meaning. I also want to thank Trent Reznor and all the musicians who have contributed to Nine Inch Nails since the beginning, the roadies and crews who made the shows run smoothly, and the millions of fans around the world, especially those who sang along in the nightclubs, arenas, and amphitheaters of the Rust Belt. It took you to make me realize.

1
Throughout the book I will first use the full title of Nine Inch Nails as well as songs and albums, then switch to acronyms. I will also use Nine Inch Nails’ rather than the more cumbersome Nine Inch Nails’s.

2
David Cullen,
Columbine
. New York: Twelve, 2009.

3
Barry Glassner,
The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things
. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

4
While acknowledging the foundational work of Stanley Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
(MacGibbon and Kee, 1972), I am using the term “moral panic” the way Angela McRobbie and Sara Thornton (1995) do, as an amplification of the symbolic meaning of actions of “folk devils” into larger-scale threats to a perceived set of community standards by various mass-media agents. McRobbie and Thornton are careful to point out that many popular culture figures now seek out the “folk devil” title as status and use the media to these ends, which is surely part of Marilyn Manson’s self-aware and satirical character.

5
Of course, how “we” should react to save our children is how a moral panic creates the new moral order, which is the very thing Michael Moore interrogated in his 2002 documentary
Bowling For Columbine
.

6
The day after the Columbine shooting, local reporter Genevieve Anton interviewed students about the habits of the Trench Coat Mafia, and one student reported, “They listen to stuff like (rock group) Nine Inch Nails, not real happy stuff.” Quoted from “Massacre at Columbine High: The Trenchcoat Mafia outcasts.”
The Advertiser
, April 22, 1999.

7
A week after the shootings the
New York Times
interviewed eight Columbine students. The reporter asked a series of questions about the shooters, the school, and teen culture. To the question, “Adults are concerned about violent computer games and song lyrics. Is this a large part of teen-age life today?” and follow up question, “What’s the appeal of Marilyn Manson?” Dylan Klebold’s self-proclaimed best friend responded, “Okay, they listened to Marilyn Manson, but not like some people. They listened to him every once in a while. They listened to Nine Inch Nails. They listened to Rammstein. They listened to Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM because of the beats. Because Dylan wanted to be a drummer. He didn’t even know what they were saying in Rammstein. He doesn’t speak German. He just liked the beat of the song. The same with Dr. Octagon, D.J. Spookie [
sic
], all those techno bands. They’ve got these beats to them.” Quoted from “Terror In Littleton: The Community; Columbine Students Talk of the Disaster and Life.”
The New York Times
, April 30, 1999, p. 27.

8
Larry Leibstein and Thomas Rosenstiel, “The Right Takes a Media Giant to Political Task.”
Newsweek
, June 12, 1995, p. 30.

9
Alec Foege, “Scorned, Shunned and Doing Quite Nicely.”
The New York Times
, December 3, 1995.

10
Robert Wright, “‘I’d Sell You Suicide’: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson.”
Popular Music
19, No. 3 (2000), pp. 365–85.

11
“Music Violence: How Does it Affect Our Children.” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Restructuring, and the District of Columbia
of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, November 6, 1997.

12
John D. Sutter, “Columbine Massacre Changed School Security.” cnn.com, April 20, 2009.

13
Kate Harding, “Keeping Kids Safe after Columbine: At What Cost?” salon.com, October 12, 2009.

14
He didn’t just inspire a generation of fans, but cinema as well. See
Queen of the Damned
(2002) and
The Machinist
(2004) for the most obvious examples.

15
Alan Di Perna, “In the Flesh: Trent Reznor Meets Roger Waters.”
Revolver
, November 2000.

16
See David Harvey’s
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) for more about the legacy of Reagan’s economic and social policies on twenty-first century life.

17
Many thanks to Karen Collins, who explored the parallels between industrial music and dystopia in her dissertation “The Future Is Happening Already: Industrial Music, Dystopia, and the Aesthetic of the Machine” (University of Liverpool, 2002).

18
Eric Weisbard. “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Spin
, March 1996, pp. 34–42, 96.

19
For general Cleveland rock history see John Gorman and Tom Feran,
The Buzzard: Inside the Glory Days of WMMS and Cleveland Rock Radio, a Memoir
. Cleveland, OH: Gray & Co., 2007. See also Carlo Wolff,
Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories: True and Tall Tales of the Glory Days, Told by Musicians, DJs, Promoters, & Fans Who Made the Scene in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s
. Cleveland, OH: Gray & Company, 2006.

20
This was the proverbial “sissy band” Reznor later decried to a journalist who sought to debunk his gothic gloom by recalling Reznor’s early new wave days.

21
“Chris Vrenna: Confessions of an Audio-Addicted Tweaker.” audiohead.net, site maintained by Steph Jorgl.

22
Greg Rule, “Trent Reznor.”
Keyboard
, April 1994.

23
Steve Dougherty, Tom Alexander, Tom Nugent, and John Hannah, “The Music of Rage.”
People
, February 6, 1995.

24
Vintage Synth Explorer, “Oberheim Xpander.” vintagesynth.com

25
Trent Reznor, “Subject: NIN—FIXED AT LAST.” Trent Reznor’s Posts on Prodigy, December 12, 1992, archived on
The NIN Hotline
.

26
Stacey Sanner. “Portrait of a Nine Inch Nail.”
Alternative Press
, issue 31, July 1990.

27
Michael Fiscus, “One of the First NIN Interviews Ever!”
AM Publishing
, February 1996.

28
Jim Greer. “Nine Inches of Love.”
Spin Magazine
, March 1992, pp. 38–43.

29
There has yet to be a good general or critical historical text on the popular music genres of the “alternative” era, but Joshua Clover’s
1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About
(University of California Press, 2009) is a great place to start. See especially his writing on the British rave scene, which Reznor very explicitly aligned himself against due to its “mindless hedonism,” although the futurist themes and technologies were similar.

30
Michael Azerrad, “Nine Inch Nails.”
Rolling Stone
, February 22, 1990, p. 30.

31
ITT has a sordid history and was used as an early example of how multinational corporations use their economic power to subvert national government (Sampson, 1973). In the 1960s ITT tried to buy the network ABC but was subject to antitrust action, and engaged in numerous hostile takeovers. According to State Department documents of CIA activity in Chile, ITT was potentially funding the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile (Hinchey Report 2000).

32
“Religion: The Jesus Evolution.”
Time
. September 24, 1973.

33
These festivals, some grassroots like Watson’s and others organized by large evangelical organizations, helped develop the Christian music industry into a major economic and
cultural force in the 1980s, and their music crossed over into mainstream pop and rock in the 1990s.

34
David Kushner, “Trent Reznor’s Pretty Hate Machines.” salon.com, September 17, 2002.

35
Ann Powers, “In Defense of the Nasty.” Village Voice, September 22, 1995. Martin Huxley discusses Powers’s article in his book
Nine Inch Nails: Self-Destruct
. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997, pp. 210–11.

36
William Shutes, “Reznor Critic Missed Point of School Award.”
Sharon Herald
, June 5, 2006.

37
Reznor was listed as one of the “Others of note” in the article “Famous Mercer Countians: The Top 10 Mercer Countians Who Made a Mark on the World.”
Sharon Herald
, June 23, 2006.

38
Brown & Root, a Texas company that were pioneers in offshore drilling, were acquired by Halliburton in 1962 and built Naval infrastructure during the Vietnam War. This was the first time the US Military gave large scale contracts to private companies rather than having combat engineers and Seabees do the work (Pratt 1997) and earned the company the nickname Burn & Loot during anti-war protests.

39
A weather balloon tied to a camera used to film the “Down In It” video blew away and the footage was found by police in Michigan, who suspected it to be evidence of a murder because it showed Trent lying motionless on the ground covered in cornstarch. The case was covered by
Hard Copy
on March 5, 1991. Reporter Rafael Abramovitz called Reznor, “A man with a flare for wearing jewelry … in his nose … and who has total disregard for what police have to go through every day of their lives.”

40
Steel Town
, from United Film Presentation, The American Scene Series (U.S. Office of War Information—Overseas bureau, 1945).

41
Harold L. Ickes, “The Place of Housing in National Rehabilitation.”
The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics
, 1935.

42
Letter to Youngstown
, directed by Robert Welchans. Youngstown Sheet and Tube, 1961.

43
Jefferson R. Cowie and Joseph Heathcott,
Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization
. Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003, p. 6.