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.

—

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 in this savage nation and met with little more than, as Stoned Jesus might put it, “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.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

The Fragile came out on Sept. 21, 1999, as the third Nine Inch Nails album. I’ve owned it since that day and just not listening to it to write this piece I managed to hear a detail of light atonal guitar strumming at 2:47 into “The Day the World Went Away” that I’ve never heard before. Following the gripping pop-industrial-metal of 1994’s The Downward Spiral, which produced hits “Closer,” “March of the Pigs” and its subdued atmospheric finale “Hurt,” was no easy task and auteur/frontman Trent Reznor managed to change the entire scale and framework through which the band functioned. The Fragile is as cinematic as it is aggressive, petulant in its emotionalism at times but ferocious in its delivery — Reznor‘s line about being “Too fucked up to care anymore” in opener “Somewhat Damaged” echoes “Nothing can stop me down ‘cuz I don’t care anymore” from the prior album’s “Piggy” — and its scope was like nothing the band had done, topping an hour and 43 minutes and comprising two individual discs, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and 23 songs in its original incarnation. It is the kind of record that, 21 years after the fact, one might just put it on and hear something new even after listening to it enough times that it seems to run through the body at the same speed as one’s own blood.

Like most double-albums, it has material that could be easily cut for time. Some of The Fragile‘s instrumentals and experiments — beginning with “The Frail,” “Just Like You Imagined,” “La Mer” and the militaristic “Pilgrimage” on ‘Left’ and including “The Mark Has Been Made,” “Complication” and closer “Ripe [With Decay]” on ‘Right’ — might feel superfluous to a cruel editorial process, but they nonetheless serve a function in enhancing the atmosphere and underscoring the absolute all-in nature of the album itself. The rhythmic chains in “The Fragile,” the electronic zapping noises set to the rhythm of “Into the Void,” the drone that backs “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You Finally,” and the way the twisting melody of what might otherwise be a guitar solo in “Even Deeper” so perfectly suits the jazzy beat behind it; with all of these and so, so, so many more, The Fragile becomes an album of richness and detail unmatched by anything Nine Inch Nails did before or has done since. Reznor‘s work since has developed an ambient side and continued the style of hooks one finds manifest in The Fragile cuts like “The Wretched,” “We’re in This Together Now,” “The Fragile,” “Even Deeper,” “Into the Void,” “Where is Everybody,” “Please,” “Starfuckers Inc.” and “The Big Come Down” as much as those songs continued a thread from The Downward Spiral and the prior 1992 EP, Broken, and 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine. But The Fragile represents an intersection between perfectionism of craft and unmitigated mania of self-indulgence. The prior album was certainly the commercial breakthrough, but it’s The Fragile where Reznor demonstrates the truest reach of his project. Every tone, every sound, every second of it is considered.

That extends even to The Fragile‘s most cringe-worthy inclusion, which is unquestionably “Starfuckers Inc.,” which seems to be Reznor doing his best impression of then protege Marilyn Manson — who as I recall appeared in the video — and even with the would-be sexually transgressive lines, “And when I suck you off not a drop will go to waste/It really isn’t so bad once you get past the taste,” doesn’t say nearly as much as the phallus-as-weapon comment on masculinity in the prior album’s “Big Man with a Gun,” but being over-the-top with teen-angst-esque lashing out against the commercial ecosystem in which the album would inevitably reside is the point. The fact that “Starfuckers Inc.,” with its signature weighted-buzzsaw guitar chug and driving chorus, is one of The Fragile‘s catchiest songs — and that’s saying something — is not happenstance either. Like everything else around it, there’s a point being made, even if it’s more rudimentary-feeling than the spaces cast forth in “The Great Below” or “The Day the World Went Away” or some of the many transitional drones and elements that bring one song into the next throughout.

Neither is “Starfuckers Inc.” the only point of immediacy on The Fragile. “No, You Don’t” picks up from its atmospheric introduction to a straight-ahead riff and quick-arriving verse, and though it’s more mellow in its impact, “Even Deeper” is as effective as it is in no small part for its willingness to return to the chorus, likewise “We’re in This Together” and “The Fragile.” Between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, the former proves the more structured and the latter more abstract at least in the general listening experience — true enough to “left-brained” and “right-brained” — but while The Fragile essentially reads are two distinct entireties, each with its purposeful beginning, middle and end, the time it spends flitting between different sounds and styles throws open the bounds of expectation, and Reznor and producer Alan Moulder execute and bring the material to bear with such a feeling of control that, in combination with the high grade songwriting on display — the fact that many of these tracks are still pop songs — the album remains accessible even to the moderately adventurous listener.

I’ll happily argue for The Fragile as the peak-era of Nine Inch Nails. It would be 2005 before the band returned with the strikingly toothless With Teeth, and proceeded into atmospheres and craft that, while interesting for someone operating at the level of attention Reznor invariably would receive, were largely void of innovation. Nothing lasts forever. And in that regard, it’s all the more fortunate that The Fragile is as long and as comprehensive as it is — an expanded edition showed up some years ago as well — since this glut of material represents a deep place of personal expression to which even Reznor has said he’s not willing to return. Fair enough. More than two decades on, The Fragile stands out not only from its era — to wit, it came out the same day as Type O Negative‘s World Coming Down — but from what would follow in its wake. It was the end of one century and the beginning of another, and The Fragile didn’t so much paint a vision of the future as it did reconcile the present with what was about to be.

I love this record. I hope you enjoy it too.

—

Blueberry picking in Manalapan? In the back of the car, The Pecan calling out the names of different trucks, mostly accurately, and narrating the drive. “Going this way. In the grey car. Cement mixer round and round!” He’ll be three in October. There was a time we were worried about his speech. That is less the case now.

So anyway, we’re on our way to Manalapan. To pick blueberries. I don’t eat them — too much sugar — but The Patient Mrs. and The Pecan will enjoy. We found fresh strawberries last Friday after going to Space Farms, so this feels like an appropriate follow-up. Elsewhere, and not that far away, people are dying. People are marching for long-overdue freedom. We are going to pick blueberries. It is important to remember the context in which one’s actions take place.

This week was hard. Not as hard as it would be if I had COVID-19. And not as hard as it would be if I was marching for long-overdue freedom. But hard. Living in my head with Bad Voice hard.

The Patient Mrs. and I discussed this week when we might go places together again. New Jersey is starting indoor dining next week, which seems absurd and dangerous to me. I said another two weeks at least to see how things shake out before, say, she goes to a grocery store. It’s been since March, so if she’s antsy to do a thing — anything — I get it. She leaves the house plenty but doesn’t see a ton of people, and she’s much more of an extrovert than I am. The Pecan being back in part-time daycare the last two weeks (they’re off this coming week) has eased the general tension level some, but I remain an impatient, miserable shit, so I expect basically to continue ruining whatever positivity might surround me at any given point, including that emanating from my beautiful wife and child.

A contaminant, then.

New Gimme Radio show today — they’ve started calling it Gimme Metal instead of Gimme Radio, presumably because they’re branching out — Gimme Country, etc. — and I guess that makes sense. But if Gimme Radio is the umbrella under which Gimme Metal resides, the show’s still on Gimme Radio. The Obelisk Show isn’t especially metal, most of the time. I don’t know. Maybe I need to listen to more metal.

Anyway, 5PM Eastern if you’re up for it. If you’re not, that’s fine too but don’t tell them I said that. Playlist is here. Listen here: http://gimmeradio.com

Nos habitant stultitia.

Great and safe weekend. Be careful. Be well. FRM.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch