FEATURE:
Mr. Self Destruct
Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral at Thirty
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I will come to…
IN THIS PHOTO: Nine Inch Nails captured in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Albert Watson
a review for Nine Inch Nails’ second studio album, The Downward Spiral. Released on the same day as Soundgarden’s Superunknown - 8th March, 1994 -, this album was perhaps even less conventional and uncommercial. In the sense that it does not instantly sound radio-friendly and bound for the charts. A concept cycle about a man who goes to a downward spiral to the point of suicide, one might wonder why it his album remains so popular and ensuring. If some critics in 1994 found the music too abrasive and off-putting, The Downward Spiral has received retrospective correction and much more praise. Due to the delayed release of the album – because of the time it took to record -, maybe there was a sense of disappointment after hype and wait. Even so, The Downward Spiral reached number two in the U.S. It has sold over four million copies. If small faction did see this as career suicide for Nine Inch Nails, there are more than that who view The Downward Spiral as a compelling classic. The Nine Inch Nails lead, Trent Reznor, had moved to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles - the site of the murder of actress Sharon Tate by members of the Manson Family in 1969 - to record. It was transformed into a studio for the band’s 1992 Broken EP and The Downward Spiral. Maybe helping the sound and tone of the album, it is a very strange and dark settings to record anything! Maybe indicative of the mindset of Reznor at the time, it is a hard listen for anyone not familiar with Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has said how The Downward Spiral was an extension of his own personal struggles, as he was dealing social anxiety disorder and depression and he had started his abuse of narcotics. A perfectionist in the studio, he was dealing with alcohol binges and writer's block.
I want to come to some features about The Downward Spiral. Last year, Kerrang! talked about the cultural impact of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 masterpiece. Within the darkness and despair is something that has endured and survived. A brilliance and work that so many people have taken to heart. Perhaps the most revealing and raw album from the U.S. band:
“I really like The Downward Spiral,” the band’s fearsome, then 29-year-old Trent Reznor said upon completion of a second album that’s become a byword for singular, uncompromising excellence. “There aren’t any obvious radio and MTV songs.”
At that point Trent was right, of course. The Downward Spiral seemed entirely alien and far from chart fodder. One of its singles was a relentless, throbbing, structurally unusual assault called March Of The Pigs. Closer featured the lyric, ‘I want to fuck you like an animal,’ against a hissing disco beat. Elsewhere, on Heresy, Trent spits, ‘God is dead and no-one cares.’ Even the album’s most accessible track, the piano-driven closer Hurt, was about self-harm and heroin addiction. In fact, that such a stark, nakedly vulnerable offering could, by contrast, appear so welcoming, is testament to the sense of pervading despair.
Despite The Downward Spiral seeming so unpalatable – the sound, as Trent put it in 1998, of “shedding skin, taking a layer off and analysing it” – the album became an unprecedented success. Upon its release, it reached Number Two in the Billboard 200.
“All I hope is that there are a few people who’ll think, ‘Wow, I’m not the only person who thought those things,’” Trent said upon its release. The album has since sold a remarkable 3.7 million copies in the U.S. alone.
“I made a small-scale, personal, potentially ugly record that reflected how I felt,” was Trent’s understated appraisal. Showcasing a complicated relationship with his responsibilities as an artist that continues to this day, he added, “Some of those ugly things are things you wouldn’t want to tell your mom, your friends or even your lover. But it’s no public fucking service either. It’s just what I felt.”…
Two rock classics were also looming large over his creative thoughts: David Bowie’s 1977 album Low, and Pink Floyd’s 1979 release The Wall. Both featured artists making drastic left turns during fraught periods in their lives. In Bowie’s case, it was his struggle with cocaine, coupled with a sense of dislocation after moving from Los Angeles to Berlin. Pink Floyd, meanwhile, had grown disillusioned with the scale of their shows during 1977’s In The Flesh tour, not to mention the way their audience interacted with them. This culminated in an incident during a show at Montreal Olympic Stadium, when bassist and songwriter Roger Waters spat in the face of one rowdy fan. The Wall was Roger’s exploration of his own horror and the self-imposed isolation it inspired.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Harries
The Downward Spiral clearly pulled on threads from both albums. From Low, as illustrated by a largely instrumental second half created with ambient supremo Brian Eno, was the use of synthesisers to build soundscapes that conveyed an atmosphere of disquiet (NIN would, of course, end up supporting David Bowie on his Outside Tour in 1995). From The Wall, The Downward Spiral took the idea of having an overarching concept in which to articulate a sense of frustration and alienation. Trent Reznor, like Roger Waters, had felt the deep undercurrent of negativity that can envelope a rock star on a big stage. And, as Roger Waters had done on The Wall, Trent built an album around a wounded central figure to help him navigate it.
At that point in his life, Trent’s wounds had numerous sources. His relationship with bandmate Richard Patrick had become so fractious that Richard would quit in the midst of recording The Downward Spiral, and form new band Filter soon afterwards. As one source of anxiety disappeared, however, another took its place, as Trent’s relationship with drugs intensified during the 18-month recording.
Despite his struggles, NIN had no trouble recruiting formidable talent to bring this bleak vision to life, with the legendary Flood (aka Mark Ellis) co-producing, and contributions from the likes of Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins and King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew. The latter, who would play on three more NIN albums, is on particularly searing form during opener Mr. Self-Destruct. Trent has since described him as “the most awesome musician in the world”.
The after effects of The Downward Spiral, however, were destructive.
“I wound up distorted, someone I didn’t know,” Trent would say of the aftermath to K! in 1999. The Downward Spiral had an effect on the wider world, as well. Upon its release, the Republican Party took issue with the lyrics from the track Big Man With A Gun, suggesting that they attacked American conservatives. Trent later clarified that the song satirised gangsta rap. The greater storm came in 1999, however, when it was revealed Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, had made diary references to The Downward Spiral in the years before he and classmate Eric Harris murdered 13 people”.
There are a few more pieces I want to source before I finish off. The Quietus looked at The Downward Spiral in 2014. Twenty years after its release, Nine Inch Nails’ second album sounded even more like the future then. Perhaps just as relevant today, it is a big reason why The Downward Spiral has this endurance and popularity:
“What is easily forgotten here is that Reznor was really pushing the boundaries, he was creating new sounds that would not fit into recognized emotional associations and he was doing this before the days when any floppy-haired goth could punch it out on their iPad. It does seem almost a shame that these effects are so easily reproduced these days, leading to legions of diluted and passionless NIN imitators.
Beneath all the noise, however, are some excellently crafted pop tunes. 'Piggy' and album single 'March Of The Pigs' are, for different reasons, both proof of Reznor's gift for a tasty hook. He showed this off on Pretty Hate Machine as well, but here he seems to have taken the pop sensibilities from influences like Depeche Mode and turned them into something darker and dirtier and, most of all, wrenched right out of the 80s. An incredible thing about listening to this album in context is how well it holds up in comparison to its contemporaries. Also celebrating a twentieth anniversary currently is Soundgarden's Superunknown, which happened to be the only record that kept Downward Spiral off the top of the U.S. charts when they were both released twenty years ago. Possibly owing to the clarity of Reznor's production, it's mind-blowing that these are from the same decade, let alone the same month – Superunknown sounds so 'retro' in comparison. It's no wonder that David Bowie took a shine to young Trent and his groundbreaking, obnoxious noise.
The recording process itself was also notable because at the time Reznor was renting 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, where the most famous of the Manson Family murders took place. Though it was over twenty years since Sharon Tate and her house guests were so brutally slaughtered, it was still quite a big talking point when Reznor took up residence and built Le Pig studio inside it. He later admitted that naming the studio after the word once scrawled in blood on the front door was in particularly bad taste, but would also take said door as a souvenir with him after leaving the property.
It's hard to say why he would do such a thing without much consideration over why taking up residence there was a controversial move. I do believe that Reznor was genuine in saying that it wasn't for press, but rather out of simple curiosity about 'American folklore'. Pretty Hate Machine had seen the band getting big in a "strange way" according to Reznor. And always much more the anti-star than any others at the time, he was all about satisfying himself over anyone else. In fact, Reznor went about creating angrier and angrier music with noise of escalating, clanging terror and bitter dirge. He seemed bent on creating something totally non-commercial and even went so far as taking the catchiest song on the record, 'Closer', and turning it into something nigh on impossible to get on the radio. He also accompanied it with a disturbing video showing bondage, nudity, a monkey tied to a cross and various bloody and disembodied animal parts. But to his own detriment/fortune, Reznor couldn't hide his own melodic skills and 'Closer' became his biggest hit up to that point (not to mention the heaps of praise that the video has received over the years). With this in mind, it's actually quite comical to watch him lament in interviews about 'not doing enough' to keep from getting so big.
But if I were Reznor I wouldn't regret a thing – except maybe the whole Tate house fiasco – as The Downward Spiral remains a dynamic and layered work that offers more at every listen. Though it takes time for some to fully appreciate it, its varied textures and moods make it both a staple and subverter of industrial music. The melodies are actually very accessible, once accessed; you just have to wade through and learn to appreciate the noise, distractions and overall dirt around them. Just because something jars your senses, be that thundering dissonance or the smell of 70,000 kids not giving a shit, it doesn't mean there's no poignancy and meaning behind it”.
I am going to end soon. I am interested in the LoudWire retrospective from 2023. Noticing how different The Downward Spiral is from Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, it was a long creative process making the album happen:
“By March 8, 1994, Reznor and his Nine Inch Nails cohorts finally released The Downward Spiral. The album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, bested only by Soundgarden's Superunkown in its opening week. But it didn't have a hot song right out of the gate.
The thrashy industrial rocker "March of the Pigs" was released a week ahead of the album's street date, but only managed to climb to No. 59 on the charts. It wasn't a natural song for radio play, but was definitely embraced by fans of the band in the live setting who loved the high energy BPMs that bridged the song's piano breakdowns. Adding to the song's legacy was the single-camera video for the track, which simply had the band rambunctiously performing on a white soundstage, with no mic stand in site safe. While the track set things in motion for the album, no one could have predicted what would come next.
In May of 1994, Nine Inch Nails released a funky single called "Closer" that needed major edits in order to be aired both on MTV and radio. But there was no denying the infectious nature of the song. With the memorable NSFW line, "I want to f--k you like an animal," Nine Inch Nails had a hit on their hands. "The song started with that line. Everything else kind of got pieced around that," said Reznor. "I was trying to get a vibe something like the song 'Nightclubbing' from Iggy Pop's album The Idiot. I don't know what it sounded like when it came out. But now it sounds like a real obvious, cheesy, almost disco, song--but in a cool way."
And while the song needed edits to cover the curse words, the video needed much more work before it could air. The singer told Spin, "I thought, f--k it, instead of the Super 8 video directors we've used in the past, underground people, let's go with Mr. F--king Gloss, Mark Romanek, who just did that Michael Jackson piece of s--t. But he could do a beautiful shot, Stanley Kubrick-like in its attention to detail. So we decided to spend some money and go to ridiculous lengths to recreate some works of artists that we liked, from Joel-Peter Witkin to Man Ray, Brothers Quay, this hodgepodge of stuff. The video was great. It was cool as f--k looking. Right away, MTV said, 'Can't have that, can't have that.' Now okay, there was naked p--sy. We knew that was going to get cut. And then we got complaints that people still found the video disturbing. 'Well why?' 'Well, we don't know why, but it seems satanic and evil.' And then I thought, 'Great, we did it.'" "Closer would fall just shy of breaking the Top 40 on Billboard's Hot 100, but did climb to No. 11 at Alternative Radio”.
I will end with Rolling Stone’s review from 1994. In a year of such diversity and brilliance, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral definitely sat alongside the best. During a year where Britpop was starting to really take shape in the U.K., U.S. albums like The Downward Spiral and Soundgarden’s Superunknown offered something opposite. A much darker and inward-looking sound to the more jubilant and bombastic British alternative:
“NINE INCH NAILS achieve a new kind of loud on The Downward Spiral: accessible hard-rock moves overlaid with a scrim of electronic racket, white noise, screams, the kind of blown-speaker rattle that seems to use the limitations of crappy stereo equipment the way that Hendrix riffed on the distortion that howled from overdriven Marshall stacks. It’s a new frontier in rock & roll: music that pins playback levels far into the red. You have only two options with this album: Play it too softly, or play it too loud.
When you slap on “Mr. Self-Destruct,” for example, the first song on the CD, the soft passages are soft chiefly in the sense of not being loud, as if there were a really great party down the street that you were wimping out on, pumped guitars and cranking boom-thwack drum machines and whatnot. But almost as soon as you rush to your pre-amp and squeeze in more juice, the loud comes back in, but so unimaginably loud this time that you think your speaker coils might melt, and old man Reilly in the next apartment has already started to bang his broomstick on the wall.
Then you turn it down and start the cycle again. Sure, bands like Nirvana play the soft-loud game, too, but Nine Inch Nails auteur Trent Reznor takes it to sadistic extremes, especially since the song — without the power riffing and the howl, the distortion and the infinite layering — would essentially be as melodic as a late Beatles tune.
What Robert Plant was to the post-blues screech and Kurt Cobain is to Northwest grunge, Reznor is to tortured death-disco howl — existential pain expressed as rock & roll. His 1990 anthem, “Head Like a Hole,” from Pretty Hate Machine, came this close to becoming what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became — the theme song of smart misfits everywhere. Then Nine Inch Nails stole the show from Jane’s Addiction on the first Lollapalooza tour — and sold more T-shirts, too. And when the steel-edged dance-punk hybrid known as industrial finally became popular, a lot of people were betting that Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, the two most important bands associated with the genre, had the potential to redefine rock in their own image.
Ministry, of course, did kind of redefine rock, with an awe-inspiring speedmetal/disco blend that delighted Beavis and Butthead even as it failed to win many converts from fans of less extreme music. Nine Inch Nails came out with Broken at the end of ’92, an intriguingly unlistenable meditation on how much Reznor hated his old record company. While the EP didn’t really break new ground, it did get that second-album thing out of the way.
“March of the Pigs,” the first single from Spiral, alternates purest torment — the anguish of swine before the slaughter — with a piano hook saccharine enough to sell pre-sweetened cereal to toddlers. “Piggy” is an affectionately whispered, almost-tender lost-love song that carries the emotional weight of a George Jones ballad. There’s a lot of pig imagery in the song, perhaps inspired by the nihilist legend carved into slain actress Sharon Tate’s pregnant belly, but the LP is less nihilistic than you might expect.
Recorded not incidentally in the Beverly Hills living room where Tate was murdered (the living room, also not incidentally, of Reznor’s home), The Downward Spiral explores Reznor’s No. 1 subject — control — in a thousand different guises. Paranoia, predation and acceptance, sex power and religious power and gun power, the power of the suffering over the guilty and the consumer over the consumed are all blasted out with the kind of overwhelming presence Baudelaire might have had if he’d had access to a battery of Macintoshes, a MIDI hookup and a Strat.
Reznor’s voice seduces and insinuates where it previously expressed itself only in animal screams; it slithers into your ears and curls up somewhere near the medulla oblongata. He sometimes even expresses an emotion that isn’t anger, which throws the full-on assault of his catch phrases — “Don’t you tell me how I feel”; “Your God is dead, and no one cares” — into brilliant relief.
The Downward Spiral is music the blade runner might throw down to: low-tech futurism that rocks”.
Turning thirty on 8th March, I do hope there is new inspection of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. Viewed as one of the most important albums of the 1990s and some of Trent Reznor’s best work, it is an album that everybody needs to hear – even if it is quite challenging and dark. Out on the same day as the quite bleak and anxious Superunknown, it was an interesting day for releases. Regardless, that day – 8th March, 1994 – gave us two classics from two remarkable bands. The tremendous The Downward Spiral is definitely…
WORTHY of respect and applause.