Friday Full-Length: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral
Easily one of the most lauded albums of the 1990s in any genre, a commercial breakthrough for Nine Inch Nails selling over four million copies, and a record whose influence can still be felt driving bands today who are considered pioneers, The Downward Spiral was released in 1994 and the response was immediate. Singles “March of the Pigs” and “Closer,” later “Hurt” and “Piggy,” were enticing and I remember being 12 years old and seeing the “Closer” video on MTV. I hadn’t heard anything like it and had only seen such gruesome sexualized imagery, well, in horror movies I wasn’t supposed to watch and in the bowels of a dial-up era internet. All that writhing and silhouetted mic-licking fit right in.
I won’t fool myself into believing I have something to say about The Downward Spiral, some accolade to throw at it, that hasn’t been said in the 30 years since its release. To be honest, the songs are such a given in my mind, from the speeding-up sound of someone being beaten as the introduction to the intensity of “Mr. Self-Destruct” at the album’s outset to the minimalist emo whispers of “Hurt” — which if you need to be reminded was eventually covered by Johnny Cash — at the finish, it is a 65-minute deep-dive into some of the darkest incarnations of pop that have been wrought since the birth of the form in the early and mid-20th century.
Every time I see one of these grown-up-five-year-old dickweeds with their Trump flags and “back the blue” stickers on their $80,000 “don’t tread on me” pickup trucks, the most entitled motherfuckers ever to walk the face of the earth whose every action is nothing more than a jerkoff to their own unthinking white supremacy, “Big Man With a Gun” plays in my head as an assault on the ridiculousness of masculinity. I’d argue that song in particular is more relevant now than when it was written, not the least for its transgressive weaponization of on-male ambiguous sexual threat, one of The Downward Spiral‘s most powerful statements, and it’s a minute-and-a-half long afterthought to the epic ending of “I Do Not Want This,” answering back a layered build-up there around the repeated lines, “I wanna know everything/I wanna be everywhere/I wanna fuck everyone in the world/I wanna do something that matters.” Turns out you just did.
There are a few levels on which The Downward Spiral is one of a kind. Trent Reznor, founder, songwriter, producer, live guitarist/vocalist, and generally regarded as the auteur of Nine Inch Nails (he also scores the occasional Disney movie, which is a demonstration of the marvelously absurd potentiality of popular culture), neither invented hard-industrial music nor made The Downward Spiral alone. The band’s second album, it followed 1989’s keyboardier Pretty Hate Machine and built on an already aggressive sound. More guitar. More drums. More force, anger and impact. Somehow “March of the Pigs” is punk. A host of collaborators like Adrien Belew (King Crimson, etc.), Chris Vrenna, Danny Lohner, Charlie Clouser and a veritable army of 
mixing engineers are undernoted in the narrative that’s emerged as years and decades gone on, and this can be taken as a result of the unlikely intimacy of the material.
As far as it ranges between pieces like the quiet ambience of “A Warm Place” and the unmatched expanse and impact of “Reptile” — a late highlight in the more experimental back half, alongside “The Becoming,” “Big Man With a Gun,” “Eraser” and the experimentalist title-track; “Hurt” aside, The Downward Spiral was also ahead of its time in frontloading its singles, and part of the point of that song is its exception and comedown — it is still written from a sole, lonely perspective, often read as that of Reznor himself. Lyrics in the first person. Even just considering its god-directed violence, admittedly wrought in a more liberal time — the ’90s before the internet crashed the traditional structures of the music industry and unregulated consolidation took hold, killing rock stars and moving pop in more hyper-accessible directions — a piece like “Heresy” doesn’t have an uncommon message in either heavy metal or post-modernism, “Your god is dead and no one cares,” but its subversion happened at a scale and with an audience reach that would and could not happen now. Not only would Reznor have been dropped from Interscope Records owing to the delays in making The Downward Spiral, the greater likelihood is he’d never be signed to a major label in the first place.
A person wiser than myself once told me that some records you only get to make once. That’s the album into which your entire self is poured. The album on which every second is scrutinized, thought through, executed with purpose to be what it becomes. And then it all works. I’ll gladly admit that in my own listening habits, The Downward Spiral features less than 1999’s The Fragile (discussed here) when it comes to Reznor‘s work, but part of that is because the earlier LP remains so strikingly intense front-to-back. Its quieter stretches, in “Piggy” or “A Warm Place,” “The Downward Spiral” or “Hurt,” highlight atmospherics and provide a necessary moment of recovery from the assaults of “Mr. Self-Destruct,” “Big Man With a Gun” and “Reptile,” not to mention the songs not directly next to them in the tracklisting, but part of what the album does so well is to create a sense of mania behind its craft, as though all of it is part of a single episode, whether that looks like a psychotic break, delusion, or reality. It’s not the only time pop music was used as a tool for punishment, but for sure it is among the most extreme examples of same, and its attention to detail indeed extends to every nuance, tone, noise and flourish. Not without some painstaking in the process, it is sculpted and made to be perfect unto its imperfections.
There are sundry reissues and special editions available, scores of remixes by Reznor and others that are of varying levels of interest and quality, but The Downward Spiral is a once-in-a-lifetime album, both from the people who made it and as a listener fortunate enough to be alive at the point in history when it arrived. It is the very definition of a landmark, and its resonance has not dulled in the 30 years since it was first released, however expanded industrial music has become largely in its wake.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Something a little different, I guess. I’ve been slowly getting to know Health’s latest album, last December’s Rat Wars, after seeing them at Roadburn this year, and that led me back to their collaboration with Reznor on the 2021 single “Isn’t Everyone,” which is quite good, and back to The Downward Spiral. At the same time, I also have an Author and Punisher live video that I’ve been trying to find time to write about all week — shooting for Monday there, but it’s out, you can find it — and so there’s a tie-in there as well. Machine churn in my brain. That happens every now and again. I’ll allow that could be a manifestation of concerns for a bleak-looking future.
I don’t try to avoid politics on this site, but neither do I actively post opinion pieces separate from writing about music, and I very easily could. Very little I enjoy more than agreeing with myself, if you couldn’t tell. But I want to say outright that I am ashamed of my country for funding the genocide of Palestinian people and disgusted by the cynicism that has tied that same atrocity to American electoral politics — Benjamin Netanyahu attacking Lebanon because no one in the US who could actually do anything about it can afford the liability of telling him not to until after votes are cast. In the meantime, people die. Children die. And having lived through 20 years of wars of aggression wrought as a response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, empty in their purpose apart from void-of-morality revenge and profiteering, to see the same thing happening again in answer to a single attack on Oct. 7 and the taking of hostages is hard, never mind being complicit in what’s been stated as the intentional eradication of an entire group of people. This is genocide. The country in which I was raised, in which I live, supports it. This has only become more disgraceful over the last year. Joe Biden, already a hero for stepping down from the election to let Kamala Harris run and give the Democratic party any chance whatsoever, is the only person who could ever break with backing Israel in the wrong and horrifying course it’s taken — he has nothing to lose, politically; the ultimate lame duck — and he’s too old, in too weak of a position, and too undermined by foreign interests sowing discord in Congress and the media dialectic. That “terrible quagmire” has become a condition of existence isn’t a surprise necessarily, but it sure does suck.
And if I need to say this too, fuck every Republican. Yes, all of them. Even your dad. Even your neighbor. Even ones with riffs. Democrats aren’t much better — to put it in similar terms, fuck like three-quarters of them — but if you want to put the two major parties side by side, one is arguing for the preservation of representative government and the other is driven by the power-mad ego of a tiny-handed wannabe despot. Donald Trump is fucking pathetic. An emblem of the wrongness of dominant white American culture and 50 years of dismantling the public education system. A fool and a tool. I didn’t think he could be president once, and I won’t be false-comforted into believing it couldn’t happen again by the Harris side’s insistence that “we won’t go back.” As the parent of a trans child, I live in fear of where American discourse is and is headed in a very real way, knowing that kids like mine are bullied into oblivion or outright beaten to death on the regular and met with little more than “thoughts and prayers” and other glad-it-wasn’t-me faux sympathies. If you don’t think these issues matter, I’ll just say that maybe they do for other people, and if not for you, that’s something to be thankful for in my experience. We live in an age of commonplace horrors even before you get to the effects of climate change as seen even today as another hurricane batters another coastline to the sound of a collective yawn from everyone not immediately in its path.
That’s my piece. I in no way promise it will be the last I say about the upcoming presidential election, social issues, or the world in general. It’s my fucking site, I can write what I want. Sometimes I need to remind myself that my time doesn’t belong to anyone but me.
Next week: A video premiere for Flourishing, full album premieres for Ruff Majik, Sun Blood Stories and maybe Sonolith (I need to check on that, it has a question mark in my notes). If I can, I’d like to review the Terry Gross album, which is out and rips. I tried to this week but couldn’t make it happen.
The good news? We went to The Pecan’s school this week for a meeting for what’s called her 504 — a kind of IEP, or Individual Education Plan, that lists and legally obliges the school to accommodations for her ADHD and other needs — and all the reports we got were that she’s amazing, she’s a pleasure to have in class, that she helps her peers and that she’s a model for other kids to follow behaviorally. Made my week. She argues all the time, and sometimes, if you’re tired, or if you’ve just had enough of fighting about nothing, it gets to be such a drag. But if home is where that needs to happen so she can keep it together a bit in the outside world, fine. Better me than some poor kid or a teacher she’s hitting or shouting at or just saying no to and doing what she wants anyway because what the fuck am I going to do about it, really? It was a relief to hear she’s doing well as First Grade digs in. The start of kindergarten, if you’ll recall (I certainly do), was a far bumpier road.
I’ve gone on long enough. I hope you have a great and safe weekend. There’s a new Zelda game out yesterday, Echoes of Wisdom, that I’ll be picking up to play with The Pecan after she gets home from Girl Scouts today, so that will be fun and is something we’ve been looking forward to. Whatever you’re up to, I hope it’s a good time. Have fun, watch your head, hydrate. I’ll be back Monday with however much I manage to get written over the weekend. Until then, then.
FRM.
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Tags: Interscope Records, Nine Inch Nails, Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral, The Downward Spiral
Happy to hear the kiddo’s doing good, that’s awesome!
And yeah, fuck republicans!