They're Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and Robin Finck (2020)

https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/theyre-really-close-to-my-body/

by herbertl • 1 year ago

126 74 1 year ago

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

I've only read parts of this so far, but it's pretty extraordinary. I'm going to have to commit more time later today to read the whole thing.

I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and music in general, but the way this is written is a few levels beyond what I think I'm even capable of feeling.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

I'm always a little confused by people such as this one who loved Downward Spiral so much. It was a slide into confusion started in Broken, away from the honesty and struggle embodied in Pretty Hate Machine. It was the Pinnacle of the band's bowing to the commercial market and fall into anger which it didn't recover, IMO, from until reaching a more mature pinnacle (at least in regard to what I wanted from it and what drew me to it) on With Teeth. Right Where It Belongs is one of my all-time favorite songs wherein they both challenge the exterior and interior to greater truth, greater honesty.

DanHulton• 1 year ago

Well, I think they address why they loved it so much in the article, hell, before the first section is finished, even.

Music can be many things at once, and you can be touched by some of the things it is, even if others don't hit for you.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

I can't deny the first section described that. My confusion isn't about what the claims are or what surface knowledge presents.

As a peer comment noted, an outlet for anger is part of it, a starting point, and was useful to me too. My comment is about how that album more than others invited me to stay stuck there, remain clad and "protected" from my vulnerability. Tearing down, destroying, and randomizing are always easier than solving, creating, healing, loving, and seeing things just/right. More relevant in this context, startups are hard. Being useful is work.

The beauty in the brashness of NIN is what I believe starts with feeling less alone in your heart and leads to loving yourself and spreading that into your ambient surrounds.

As you note, I am sharing what this art is to me. I cannot say that must or should be what it is to any other person. I still hope that we can be less ashamed and equally vigorous with our caring.

DrillShopper• 1 year ago

Being an angry young man drew me to Downward Spiral, if I'm being honest.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

I appreciate the admission. I can't deny benefitting from that too. More in my response to this comments peer.

keiferski2• 1 year ago

I always saw TDS as a concept album in the vein of his later, more recent soundtracks. It feels more coherently atmospheric in ways earlier albums didn’t, to me.

With Teeth is actually where I think he went too far into “regular rock music” territory, with the result that it sounds generic and flat to me.

kbrisso• 1 year ago

With Teeth is his first sober album. He wanted the stripped back rock feel so it would sound different from the previous.

TOGoS• 1 year ago

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm sort of with you, though.

That said, I've come to appreciate The Downward Spiral. But if that was Sonic The Hedgehog 2, With Teeth (and parts of Year Zero) was Sonic The Hedgehog 3. i.e. the master work that built on everything they had learned before they ran out of ideas. The Slip is their Sonic and Knuckles, where they start going in a different, less-cool direction. Of course this is all very much my opinion, man. :)

RASBR89• 1 year ago

Downward Spiral - Sonic 2 The Fragile - Sonic 3

kridsdale1• 1 year ago

This is my favorite metaphor today, and I read TFA which has lots.

relaxing4• 1 year ago

I think that’s the first I’ve heard The Downward Spiral described as too commercial.

You don’t think Pretty Hate Machine is filled with anger and confusion?

I think if you were to look within, you’d find you were the right age to be receptive to the earlier albums, and by ‘94 you’d grown out of the level of angst.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

In '94 my angst was still accelerating. You're right that PHM contained expressions of anger and confusion. It just felt more whole than TDS.

RE commercial success [0]:

Nine Inch Nails' second studio album, The Downward Spiral, entered the Billboard 200 at number two,[57] and is the band's highest seller in the US, over four million copies, among five million worldwide.[58]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inch_Nails

borgdefenser3• 1 year ago

I think it just depends how into industrial music a person is/was.

Reznor's genius to me was in taking industrial music and making it catchy, radio friendly and basically pop.

Completely commercial compared to anything I can think of in industrial music from the time on back. Completely filled with confusion and anger though compared to say Whitney Houston from the time.

alisonatwork3• 1 year ago

Eh, to me the lyrics are what make NIN hard to deal with as a grown adult. Meanwhile Ruiner (Version) remains the best song they ever did.

Charlie Clouser's production was unparalleled at the time in the rock/industrial arena. So clean, so meticulous, it was life-changing. Over in the electronic space there were a few psytrance artists doing similar stuff, but I feel like that style of production only bubbled up into mainstream pop in the 2000s (think Britney Spears - Piece of Me). Nowadays most everything sounds just as pristine, but that just goes to show how well a track like Ruiner holds up. The opening 2 minutes still send a shiver down my spine - they're perfection!

I think that's why the TDS/FDTS era of NIN is remembered so fondly - because it's the brief period where some of their stuff sounded ahead of its time.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

The sonic cleanliness of NIN is absolutely one of the things that I love and I agree that PHM was raw compared to a far more refined TDS and what follows. The intentional arrangement or emphasis of sounds so that you do or don't have to deconflict and separate them increases the emotional and psychological fabric of the music immensely.

This makes me think of a past friend who kind of blew my mind by reporting and then insisting (when I struggled to believe) that he didn't really listen to the words in music and sometimes didn't even hear them. I totally appreciate that many people experience music almost exclusively as a tonal experience and it's fascinating to me. Music can be great on that level. I can't separate it and appreciate a song that has more thoroughly attended to more of my dimensions. Songs that satisfy that cleanliness only tonally seem incomplete and far less satisfying down to jarring. Examples of that end of the spectrum include happy songs about domestic violence that don't also punch with irony, where it's like they haven't figured out what an abusive existence they describe. I get the importance of sending telegrams from experiences we have had but too often it feels like they're going to be heard in ways that subconsciously replicate ala meme theory (at least what I know of the academic form).

For me, music is an assemblage of the aural, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and surely more as a form of compressed communication. My favorite songs sound incredible while arranging every piece you reasonably need to assemble some pinnacle thought or understanding. A very grand-in-scope example is Pink Floyd's (actually written by Polly Samson) High Hopes which discusses social and economic dynamics. I heard it later in life and it is of a much different sound but satisfies the same passionate desire in me. Another includes Bjork's Mutual Core discussing the challenges of navigating the paradoxes of individual agency within romantic unions under differences of being and definition. These and those like them each seem like someone who has done the work to drill into multi-dimensional clarity and done the work to share it in a way that reinforces and works to elevate humanity.

Sorry to carry on so but thank you for stimulating this one.

erikerikson9• 1 year ago

And thanks and sharing. As I got into what I wrote and decided I wanted to express, I got pretty far from responding to what you wrote. Sorry for that and still, thank you.

Frederation• 1 year ago

Same. I appreciate his music style and vibe but his lyrics, not so much..

thesurlydev• 1 year ago

Great post. I've been a fan of NIN for over 30 years and no other band has had such a profound impact on my life. This is saying a lot because I've always been heavily into almost all genres. My biased opinion is that there's something for everyone somewhere in their discography because the music produced has varied quite a bit over the years. If you listen to them and like what you hear, they just announced a new tour.

qwertox• 1 year ago

I should have never listened to NIN, but I have; too much. It started with Quake, then a neighbor gifted me a CD of Pretty Hate Machine and I followed it with Broken and The Downward Spiral, which then was the path I went myself.

nakedneuron• 1 year ago

The Quake soundtrack was what got me too. Sorry to hear that. Music certainly is a powerful modulator of the psyche. It can be devastating like a drug if young vulnerable and unprepared.

SmashngKbds• 1 year ago

I've been listening to NIN for 30-something years at this point. I will never stop. This article is very well written and while I can't identify with everything the author describes a whole lot of it lands. I'm really glad I found this on HN today! ...A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

noelwelsh• 1 year ago

My favourite NiN track, Call Me A Hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lm1FL7gWl4

A bit of an aside, but I love this mashup and hope some of you will enjoy it as well.

scns2• 1 year ago

And now for something completely different ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S42mc0mcrE

My fave by NiN

olddustytrail• 1 year ago

I think this is what you want

https://youtu.be/3uxTpyCdriY?si=Au5WAA8jxi66JVG3

keiferski2• 1 year ago

Trent Reznor really has one of the greatest “maturation” processes of a musical artist that I can think of. His more recent work on The Social Network and The Vietnam War is such a refined, minimalistic version of the specific sound he started forming 20+ years earlier. Not all artists manage to mature in such an elegant way; many never end up quite matching their earlier works, or head into entirely different directions.

Also, a fun random fact: Reznor’s uncle, I believe, ran a heating or HVAC company in the Pittsburgh area. You can still find the occasional industrial device with the REZNOR name on the side.

https://partner.reznorhvac.com/en/as/products/product-unit-h...

Flipflip79• 1 year ago

These are very common in Canada still and anytime I see one I point at it and make the same joke “Looks it’s Vent Reznor” and my girlfriend has never once laughed. Oh well.

rvense• 1 year ago

If you keep doing it she's sure to get it eventually.

hnburnsy• 1 year ago

When I saw NIN on PBS's Austin City Limits in 2014, I knew Trent had gone 'mainstream' in his maturity (with Robin performing too)..

https://www.pbs.org/video/austin-city-limits-nine-inch-nails...

It only takes me 3-4 somber notes from a song in a movie or TV show these days to quickly identify it as NIN or Trent\Atticus. The latest was in the season 3 finale of Invincible...

https://fandomwire.com/invincible-season-3-soundtrack-all-so...

  Episode 8: I Thought You’d Never Shut Up

  Every Day Is Exactly the Same by Nine Inch Nails

throwawaynin• 1 year ago

Atticus Ross did shogun recently too ... You can feel the non vibes in the intro

Lammy• 1 year ago

Also the Super Mario World fortress boss for some reason https://www.mariowiki.com/Reznor

thegabriele• 1 year ago

The ideal devices for a warm place.

prairiedogg3• 1 year ago

Pretty heat machine.

fipar• 1 year ago

"It instilled a belief in me that I still have to this day: that any spiritual ailment can be cured by playing music at maximum volume in a small, dark room."

This is so true to me but I never thought of putting it to words like that. I love music and darkness so much that during some especially intense moments in live shows I've been to I close my eyes instead of looking at the band.

imp0cat2• 1 year ago

Temporarily disable visual processing and redirect all the available power to audio processing. Very Star Trekish. :)

nanreh• 1 year ago

Don’t forget to polarize your hull plating as well.

genewitch2• 1 year ago

I've been to only a few concerts, relatively, 2 raves, maybe 6 concerts, and a few dozen clubs. only the "raves" were loud enough to "cease visual processing" as my sibling said. We saw Ron D Core and Omar Santana spin at a Chinese restaurant that had a dance floor in Los Angeles, and it was so loud (not distorted, just pure air movement and wattage) that the needles were jumping. with quarters on them. Omar Santana's "metal gabber" was transcendental.

ulrikrasmussen• 1 year ago

I agree! The best concerts I've been to were the ones where I was so engaged in the music that I felt compelled to close my eyes for most of the experience.

dingaling• 1 year ago

I'll always feel slightly guilty when I look at the box-set of "And all that could have been" on my shelf.

I bought it from a second-hand music store years ago and when I took it up to the checkout to pay for it ( for it was the days of cash ) the cashier looked heartbroken.

"I'd been saving up to buy that," she whimpered.

I bought it anyway.

I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN collective...

roadbuster• 1 year ago

I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN collective...

You won't find absolution here; shame!

fireburning• 1 year ago

any idea why they chose 9 inch nails?

kind of crazy coincidence in the recent ethiopian conflict a new approach they used was to nail the uterus of women with 9 inch nails to make sure entire tribes are reduced in numbers but without raising genocide alarms

decimalenough• 1 year ago

As in, why the band chose the name? It's a reference to the length of the nails that Jesus was supposedly crucified with.

adzm• 1 year ago

Also Twenty-three Centimeter Nails wasn't nearly as catchy

dav_Oz• 1 year ago

Going through a lot of iterations until one band name "stuck", true to his obsessive working ethos in finding the "right" sound for his music.

L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?

T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150813023119/http://www.thenin...

joeconway• 1 year ago

I’ll take any opportunity I can to recommend this podcast, and this episode specifically. If this article resonates with you then it is absolutely worth the listen.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-songs-that-explain-...

dlisboa• 1 year ago

I've seen the term "hagiography" 8 times in the past three days in articles of different topics, having never heard the word before. Being that English is my second language, but the one I consume the most content in (more than my first), I pay close attention to word patterns and have seen the language evolve with my own eyes.

But this one is weird. I think it's similar to the LLMs fixation with "delve", my guess is people are using AI to suggest articles.

relaxing4• 1 year ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

PNewling• 1 year ago

Maybe? Or this might be a case of the 'Frequency Illusion'[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

sk5t• 1 year ago

Chase it with sudden repeated exposure to "hermeneutics"!

toofy• 1 year ago

Being this article is 5 years old, it’s likely just Baader-Meinhof, feels like it happens to me every time I learn a new interesting word or concept—seems like I start seeing it everywhere.

jaharios• 1 year ago

It is a Greek word, used for Saints Icons painting, Agio (Saint) + Graphi (Writing down).

Painting in Greek is zographia, Zoi ( life/living) + Graphi. The use case in the Article and English is mostly from "intellectuals" who like to use cool words without even knowing their meaning.

CompoundEyes• 1 year ago

I too have noticed this word appear recently! I read a lot about politics and I believe it has shown up there mostly. Wish I could find some examples. I think it’s been in the context of cults and martyrs.

danwills• 1 year ago

English is my first language and I had to look it up too (at least the 'hagi' part!) I think it's a relatively-rarely-used word for sure! Maybe it's recently re-entered the zeitgeist? (And there's another fairly-uncommon word for ya! Hehe)

droideqa• 1 year ago

I don’t know if I like NIN, but I love Trent Reznor’s collaborations with Atticus Ross and I love How to Destroy Angels.

RALaBarge• 1 year ago

the other day I was washing the dishes and in my head I started hearing "listen to the sound, of my big black boots"

My favorite collab is the record he did with Saul Williams, it is a banger. You can hear TR all over that thing, and that was the one (or released at the same time as the one) that was given away for whatever you wanted to pay for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz6VQCNkjAU&list=PLaqsB45loh...

My wife is going to hate me, but I am going to listen to this rn on my monitors, sorry honey!

borgdefenser3• 1 year ago

I just don't think his wife's voice is that great and I don't think the music is that inspired.

It probably depends though how much Coil a person listened to. I just don't think the music is powerful or weird enough if you are going to call the band "How to Destroy Angels".

shoo• 1 year ago

tangent: Inverse Phase's "pretty eight machine"

https://inversephase.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-eight-machine...

Head Like I/O was the track that got this entire album started. I was at Ohayocon 2011 and joking around with Dave, Dirk, and Carlson about chiptune covers, and the topic of Nine Inch Nails came up. Being a fan, I mentioned that lots of NIN songs would lend themselves to chiptunes rather well, and I decided I would try to surprise everyone with a little bit of Head Like a Hole. In a bout of productivity, I was able to do a rough edit of about two minutes of the song in a day, and the surprise was a big success. The guys all pushed me to consider doing a Nine Inch Nails EP or album.
I did this track on the Commodore 64 because I got into a conversation with Carlson about it first, and I hadn't given the C64 enough love. The idea to use more systems for the album formed as the idea for the album itself took shape.

genewitch2• 1 year ago

The first track didn't sell it, but i started on "Downloadin' it" and from there it's all good, I especially liked "Something You Didn't Ever Have"

Pretty Hate Machine was the first real album i bought with my own money, right around when CD boomboxes became affordable, 1994 or so. And that's probably why the track above hit different for me. My mom hated that song.

relaxing4• 1 year ago

Fascinating bit of writing. I appreciate that it’s personal memoir as much as biography.

Making Finck into a “mystic” feels a bit unfair. He’s a working musician and a sideman, not a rock star frontman. He takes his craft seriously, the technique of performance and the musicianship. Because he is not “in the band”, he will not be the subject of interviews. His job is not to provide you with any more insights than what you can take away yourself from the art he creates.

I’ve made this mistake myself — assuming that because someone communicates in ways that are obscure, they must be concealing some greater truth. Building up that expectation inevitably leads to heartbreak.

I imagine one of those memes that begins with the trad girl saying “thank you” and the subject of her attention would say “I’m literally just an introverted, neurodivergent musician.”

imp0cat2• 1 year ago

    Making Finck into a “mystic” feels a bit unfair.

I'd go a lot further than that. The entire article, while informative and entertaining also has major stalker vibes. I guess some fans just don't know when to stop.

They're Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and Robin Finck (2020)

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