I am so pissed off...I picked up the latest copy of the Village Voice today, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a front-page blurb that read "Blood Brothers: Trent Reznor and Tim McVeigh." Okay, I figured this had to be something very sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek about blaming musicians for the ills of the world, but the author (R. J. Smith) spends the first four long paragraphs making fun of Trent's method of expression and the videos he puts out (specifically "hurt").
Should we assume this guy didn't get put on the Pest List for Madison Square Garden and is still pissed off about it? The whole snarking bit about Time-Life footage actually says a lot more about the writer than it does about Trent...and, in my humble opinion, it ain't good. Reducing documentation of various human tragedies (particularly something like the Holocaust) to the level of a cheap punch line in order to take a shot at a musician you don't happen to like strikes me as far more offensive than the same musician using the footage to accompany a song in concert, especially when the song in question deals with all sorts of darker emotions -- despair, anguish, misery, shame, self-loathing, etc., etc., etc.
Could the folks at the Voice be cashing in on Rush Limbaugh, for once in their liberal lives? (I'm not liberal-bashing ... I just hate propaganda tactics like this one.)
The only response I can come up with is, "Of course Timothy McVeigh listens to nine inch nails. There are very few bands that allow their audience to express their pain and anger in such a direct manner. Someone like McVeigh has to have immense amounts of repressed rage in order to do something like he did, and listening to NIN was probably an avenue to let off some of that steam until it became too much. Nine inch nails fans aren't all sociopaths with a bomb in their pockets. Some of us are just very angry people with better things to do."
robin colleen moore (robin@uga.cc.uga.edu):
I still think that R.J. Smith didn't get put on the guest list for the NYC shows, and this is his revenge...or maybe his wife/girlfriend thinks Trent is cute. Whatever the reasons, it's an awfully shoddy piece of so-called "journalism," not to mention extremely irresponsible ethically. It's one thing to not like a video or a piece of music, but to equate it with a terroristic act responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people is both brainless and reprehensible....
I smell a very large, dead, stinky rat here. It just sounds like another attempt to play armchair shrink and sell papers simultaneously. It's very popular to blame the mass media for "corrupting" people these days, but the fact remains that to be corrupted in the way the critics claim, the person in question would already have to be teetering on the edge. I believe one of the definitions of pornography is/was that it would have an arousing affect on the average person, and perhaps a similar litmus test could apply here -- would listening to NIN (or seeing Natural Born Killers, or all sorts of other examples) turn the average reasonably stable person into a froth-mouthed homicidal maniac? Didn't think so....
Besides, McVeigh may have been a NIN fan because he could relate in some way to some of the emotions featured in the songs, but the fact remains that it was his own feelings and attitudes that tipped the scales...remember, you can read anything into anything if you really want to. Charles Manson thought the Beatles were telling him to start a race war by murdering white people in Beverly Hills; David Berkowitz claimed his dog was possessed by a demon who told him to shoot necking couples in cars -- hell, Fred Phelps claims he has a divine mandate to run around harassing AIDS victims' funerals. It's not just what the song/book/movie/whatever says itself, but what you bring to it as well, eh?
kathleen tibbetts (ktibbett@mail.smu.edu):
Mainly, I got the impression of a somewhat self-important journa-liste (like those exist) who was trying to astonish the waiting world with the radical non-linearity of his cultural insights and ended up sounding like a jackass instead.
For the first part, at least, I didn't find his comments all that different in kind or degree from posts made in alt.music.nin by people who didn't like the "hurt" video or even actively hated it -- or at least hated the idea of it. When Smith talked about the intensity of the song being compromised for him by watching the video, he merely echoed the sentiments expressed by many members of this conference.
What I don't follow is the McVeigh analogy. That was, if not an actual cheap shot, at least an inexplicable and weirdly sensationalistic one. Of all the "Hurt"/OKC parallels that leap to mind, the idea of Reznor (or anyone) getting a perverse kick out of his alleged accidental connection to the crime is probably the last one I'd think of. Comparisons come to mind, but that's not one of them.
elana zivinsky (armand@netcom.com):
Just call me elitist, but I seriously don't believe that if McVeigh listened to nine inch nails, he would have blown up the OKC Federal Building. NIN is a cathartic thing...it helps us past our anger.
I can't understand how somebody could listen to broken and then go out and blow up a building with thousands of people in it. It's too internalized.
aimee lortskell (aimee@crl.com):
Gee, I guess those of us NIN fans who don't bomb anything don't count at all. Not to mention those NINnies who helped clean up the mess afterwards.
lisa livingston (procyon@icon.net):
The trouble is, Trent has become so popular that some media people fear him. Both liberals and conservatives fear him, so they are going to try to link the most hideous things to him as an attempt to discredit him ("march of the pigs," anyone?). Tim McVeigh is probably not a NIN fan, and if he has even heard of the band only knows the most popular of songs -- namely "head like a hole" and "closer." We all know how mutated those songs have become now, which no doubt has Trent scratching his head in amazement. Just like the garbage that is going on now about "big man with a gun." If McVeigh is a fan, fine, good for him. But to make an insinuation that all NIN fans are bomb-making baby killers is ludicrous.
beast of eden (boe666@u.washington.edu):
That article sounds unfortunately all too typical of the Village Idiot. Their brand of progressive ideology is every bit as reactionary as Rush Limbaugh's brand of conservatism. VV is on record as supporting various forms of censorship, by the way. I boycott that rag; if I want to see something in it, I thumb through it at a magazine shop or look at it in the library (I highly recommend this practice).
Interesting, the rhetoric about "reactionary modernism"; it has an almost Stalinist ring to it.... I remember this truly reactionary little book that came out last year called Hole In Our Soul (by Martha Bayles, I believe) that went on at length about the "decadent modernism" of contemporary music, specifically citing industrial music at one point. She recommends that pop music go back to its blues roots and sever all ties with modernism. What can I say -- there are a lot of idiots out there who spend way too much time worrying about what other people are listening to.
mippy arnold (jcauto@netcom.com):
What I've read about this has really pissed me off. The bombing was a terrible thing; it's pretty foolish to think that music could push somebody to do something like that...and especially to seemingly place the blame on one person's music.
michael roston (ending@ripco.com):
I'm sorry, but that has to be the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
That cannot, I repeat, CANNOT be true. How did this DJ know the character was McVeigh, for one thing? Sounds like a play on the recent Republican attack on various musics. That's just too funny to be true. Let's see what else in the world we can link to music.
gordon craick (pred@stang.netspace.net.au):
Your country bred (McVeigh), your country will continue to breed people like him. He is not the first, he is not the last. Your country will end in civil war and the rest of the world will not give a damn.
And believe it or not, I can almost sympathise with the guy -- not that I in any way agree with the act that he committed. But I can understand what he was feeling -- anger, rejection, betrayal by his own government...you breed army machines, to be loyal to your country above all else, and when your government overmines that, you have somebody left with all the anger and nothing left to direct it against.
logre2'3 (ogre@netaxs.com):
Dag, mang...doesn't anyone know that the KGB really isn't tied to the Ukraine anymore? The KGB is Russian, and they kinda died with Communism. (And, yes, I am Ukrainian.)
(I know I just ignored the whole point of the article, but I'm tired, and I'm Ogre, and I can do whatever the fuck I want!)