Entertainment Through Pain:
Sexual Chaos and Industrial Terror
In the Music of Trent Reznor

by michael heumann
english department
university of california-riverside

Trent Reznor, a.k.a. Nine Inch Nails, has rapidly emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary popular music. Beginning with the 1989 release pretty hate machine and its "alternative" radio hit "Head Like a Hole," and continuing to 1994's the downward spiral, Reznor has successfully brought together such diverse musical genres as techno and metal, industrial and D.I.Y. rock and roll. His music -- which blends punk rock's energy with the technological sophistication of industrial and dance music -- has brought Nine Inch Nails (NIN) increased commercial success, as well as critical adulation. Roger Hilburn of The Los Angeles Times, for instance, sees Reznor as "rock's hottest new antihero," who "in his most powerful moments pushes the relatively polite alienation of most post-Nirvana bands to new levels of aggression" (8,9).

While Hilburn's comments highlight the importance of Reznor's musical vision, they also posit NIN as a band that is breaking beyond the cultural and economic limits set by the commercial music industry. True or not, this is quite often the way the mainstream press perceives Reznor; in fact, he is known more for his violent and sadistic lyrics (1) and outrageous stage antics than for any music he has ever produced. At the same time, the so-called "alternative" press often castigates Reznor, questioning "whether the rage that fuels [his] sometimes venomous music is genuine, and whether he isn't just a tad too eager to be a rock star" (Hilburn 9). In short, while Reznor's cultural image is of a dangerous outlaw, the image perceived by other so-called "outlaws" is of a figure borrowing the convenient tropes of alienation and suffering to procure a mass audience. The gap which separates these two readings, situated as it is between danger and pandering, highlights the fundamental ambivalence at work in the music of Trent Reznor. Although his background falls within the decidedly anti-commercial industrial scene, his musical approach and excessive theatrics place him very much within the long tradition of commercial rock and roll. What seems to bring these juxtaposed musical camps together is, uniquely, Reznor's own position within his music. As Eric Weisbard of The Village Voice notes, "the key" to Reznor's "triumph wasn't just adding extra guitars to pretty hate machine's teenybop death disco -- it was writing an industrial song with the word I in it" (83). By positioning himself at the center of his music, Reznor is not only able to resolve the contrasting musical attitudes but fundamentally question the role which music and the music industry play in the shaping, defining, and controlling of human bodies, subjectivities, and ideologies.

The concept of "industrial music" emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s with such groups as Throbbing Gristle, Einstuerzende Neubauten, Can, and Kraftwerk. These early bands, marginally positioned within the all-encompassing "rock and roll" culture, found their inspiration in the "cut-up" techniques of William Burroughs, the musique concrete experiments of Edgar Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge," and (of course) John Cage -- all of whom rethought the concept of "music" by incorporating into their compositions the industrial noises of cars, airplanes, and other machines; the multi-tracking (cut and paste) effects which recording technology make possible; and the eerie sounds of early synthesizers. Many of the artists that made up the early industrial scene studied under these early pioneers, and took with them many of the overt political motives behind such radical music. Jon Savage, in his overview of the "industrial culture," notes that one of the central tropes at work in the development of this movement was the belief that the dissemination of information is the central political struggle of the late 20th century, and that the goal of their music should be to denounce contemporary culture's obsession with commodities (Re/Search 5). In order to achieve these idealistic goals, industrial music sought to stay as far to the fringe of the music industry as they possibly could. Much of the music, consequently, was recorded and released by independent companies, or by the artists themselves; likewise, the music was principally relegated to non-traditional instruments -- like electric drills, cars, and washing machines, not to mention synthesizers -- in order to produce the most disconcerting musical experiences possible. The impulse of industrial music was to shock and provoke the audience into listening to the sounds of a culture's excesses, and (perhaps) to reconsider the role such excesses play in the social control of human beings.

In the years since Can and Throbbing Gristle released their first works, the music and the movement which they personify has dramatically changed; in some ways, it has become part of the mainstream it was once wholly against. In many circles today, the term "industrial" has been eradicated in favor of an array of words -- ambient, techno, rave, acid house, jungle, tribal, hip hop, punk, and gothic. In other circles, industrial is simply another aspect of the larger "alternative" universe. Despite the changes in terminology, however, the impulses and the approach to music shared by both Cage and Throbbing Gristle -- to wake people up, to attack arid cultural norms, and the black-humored examination of "all things gross, atrocious, horrific, demented, and unjust" (Re/Search 2) -- continue to be found in many contemporary groups, from Consolidated, Skinny Puppy, and Ministry to KMFDM, Moby, and Nine Inch Nails.

While Trent Reznor shares many of the impulses and desires which drive "industrial" music, he is separated from his contemporaries both by his level of success and by his relatively standard approach to making music. NIN's first album, pretty hate machine, was known specifically for the single "Head Like a Hole," a song which employs many "traditional" pop formulas, such as verse-chorus-verse song structures, heavy guitar riffs, and an anthematic (if cryptic) chorus ("Head like a hole, black as your soul / I'd rather die than give you control"). These lyrics, the edge in Reznor's delivery, the tape-looped drum, and the synthesizer-propelled melody are all linked to what is generally considered "industrial," but the song itself is wrapped in a package that is much more palatable for consumers than, say, the "deeply disturbing, very discomforting and psychologically traumatic" music of Skinny Puppy (Thompson 108). The difference, I think, is the role played by Reznor himself in the musical narrative. In much electronic or industrial music, the human agent who makes the music is decidedly absent, replaced by anonymous sounds of engines, drum beats, and voice boxes. This is the case for groups like Kraftwerk and Devo, where the uniformity of group members is used to represent the uniformity of a technologically-driven culture. Reznor, on the other hand, is always at the center of Nine Inch Nails -- in video, on stage, as well as in the music (2).

Because of the complete control he has over the image and sound of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor has often been criticized as a traitor, as someone who pretends to base his art on the tenets of "alternative" music's opposition to mainstream culture but in fact steals the conventions of such music for commercial and adulatory gain. For instance, Jason Fine of Option (an "alternative" music magazine) notes, "For all his talk about alienation, Reznor seems more interested in elevating himself above the crowd than reaching out to make any direct contact" (36). To go "above" the crowd, here, is to be larger than life, to reach the status of a "His Satanic Majesty," Mick Jagger, or the "King of Pop," Michael Jackson. Reznor, in other words, is too interested in embracing success, and, as a result, has made his own body the key signifier of his music, rather than the "message" it conveys. In this, Reznor's opposition to "industrial" music stems from his interest in the performative realm of art, where (following Adorno) the spectacle of the body (both the music and the musician) is bought and sold, rather than standing against such commodification. Fine goes on to say that "even in the most wildly synthesized, alien-sounding moments [of the downward spiral, there] is a bristling, relentless, unmistakably human energy that sucks you in" (40). Reznor's body, in other words, is so overwhelmingly present within the music that it becomes a dangerously enticing object of spectacle, distracting the listener by supplanting the significance of the musical text with a fetishistic link between the listener's desires and the work itself.

Reznor seems aware of the criticism levied at him from colleagues and critics alike, but his reaction to that criticism is unique. In an interview with Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Gold, Reznor notes that, "essentially NIN are theater. What we do is closer to Alice Cooper than Pearl Jam" (53). While this statement can be read as a tongue-in-cheek commentary about current attitudes in popular music, it also displays to what extent Reznor is cognizant of his own role within the music industry. Rather than allowing himself to fall into the trap of seeking to merge with his audience without the intervention of corporate power structures that filter down the message a band wants to convey (like Pearl Jam), Reznor sees himself as a cartoon (like Cooper) that borrows the trappings of popular media in order to sell particularly fashionable desires.

The NIN "cartoon," however, is a decidedly monstrous object, continually opening up taboo subjects and desires and blurring the boundaries between sensory impulses and "whole" bodies in ways that are traditionally silenced in the popular media. This is most evident in the videos, which are at once graphic, frightening, and visually enticing. The clip for the song "Closer" is "a multifaceted collage of images ranging from severed human heads, writhing snakes, and old men behind a dark screen to 'crucified' monkeys; sneering industrialists straight out of a German expressionist print; siblings with their hair braided together; and Reznor himself, spinning in midair so out of control he cannot even touch the ground" (Gold 52). (3) shows performance artist Bob Flanagan removing his clothes, climbing atop a large mechanical apparatus, and allowing numerous instruments to shred his hands, chest, and genitals before the device shuts its lid and grinds his flesh into a pulp. Both videos share an obsession with graphic themes, and can easily be read as sheer exploitation, using nudity, violence, and spectacle merely to lure audiences in for shock value. This reading, however, discounts the fact that it is the forces of science and technology, the yearning to discover how a body reacts to suffering, that effectively allows the bodies in these videos to be manipulated and destroyed. Hence, the videos demonstrate the phallic desire to locate the transcendental significance of an object, an idea, or an emotion that is under examination -- a fetishistic action that replicates the very process of watching and enjoying music videos themselves. In the music of Nine Inch Nails, this play between power and its material situation is worked out within the musical space of narrative structure and technological control. Within a musical environment wholly controlled by computers and MIDI interfaces, the artist must merge with these technologies in order to produce the message s/he wants to convey. NIN's the downward spiral deals with the suffering, confusion, and ultimate terror which such a link produces, and as a result suggests the role played by the discarded flesh or "data trash" that have become human bodies in a world of virtuality (Kroker and Weinstein).

Pain, as Elaine Scarry notes in The Body in Pain, is enigmatic; language cannot adequately express it. Consequently, the experience of pain separates an individual from others through the sheer silence which it imposes. There is no way to understand another's pain, just as there is no way another can understand your pain. Scarry goes further than this, however, noting that pain "does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (4). In this model, the individual loses the very parameters (imagined or otherwise) that construct subjectivity. S/he "falls" into a pre-discursive realm of noise, a term Jacques Attali defines as "a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission" (26). At its most extreme, Attali notes, "noise is a source of pain" (27), rather than the effect of the body's loss of "being." As a physical force, "noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder" (26). Although neglecting the intricacies of noise itself, and the fact that it can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways, Attali's argument here is useful because he seems to be reading noise as a potentially empowering force that can be used (in Scarry's terms) both as a weapon against a prisoner of war and tool used by the prisoner him/herself against the force that seeks to destroy one's "self."

I would argue that, while Scarry's reading of pain fits quite easily into analyses of physical violence -- methods to silence the human body's ability to represent itself to others -- her reading elides the very sonorous forces that are emitted by the body in the state of asignification. This is not to say Scarry ignores the sounds of pain in her analysis of the "unmaking" of the world. On the contrary, voices, screams, cries, and singing are all continually present, both in the actions that produce pain and in the emotional effects that reveal pain to the exterior world. In fact, she goes so far as to say, "the translation of pain into power is ultimately a transformation of body into voice" (45); and that the goal of violent actions is to destroy the body's ability to mark itself by negating the voice's position within that body. Nevertheless, while Scarry clearly recognizes the importance of sound to the articulation of subjectivity, she is unwilling to locate this "self" in anything other than a "voice" that bears a synecdotal relationship to writing. As Avital Ronell notes, "signs which bypass the voice continue to produce a metaphysical crisis" (61), which is to say that, in Scarry's attempt to write pain onto violence, she cannot seem to surmount the obstacle which the sounds emitted from a body (not simply the words that one speaks) configure in this discursive framework. This, I believe, is where music becomes specifically useful in expanding Scarry's assessment of pain. Attali notes that "music is a channelization of noise" (Attali 26), aligning the effect of music as both "a source of pain" and a narrative form that enacts another violence, namely a "mapping of difference" (deLauretis 121), which marks and orders bodies and identities within a discursive order. The problem with music as a narrative agent, then, is not that (as it is traditionally represented) it fails to be specific but that it exceeds the confines of most narrative maps and expresses much of the pain ("noise is a source of pain") that such discourses strive to conceal. In other words, music is less tied to direct signifier-signified correlations, if only because the "grain of the voice" (as Barthes describes it) or the musical experience cannot be wholly contained within a written formula but is only available through the act of listening. This open framework for music is not absolute, for oftentimes musical structures and conventions take the place of the music itself, or reduce it to an already programmed input-output system that subdues any openings that music might offer. NIN's the downward spiral, however, is different, principally because the theme of pain is connected with the equally enigmatic interplay between human sensations and technologically-produced sounds.

The principle theme in Reznor's music is the disintegration of the "self," both in the form of a violence enacted upon one's body by external forces and as a seething desire to eradicate one's own subjectivity in a nihilistic push toward extinction. While these are not new topics for pop music (Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, and Nirvana all come to mind) Reznor's approach is unique because he positions his own body (figured musically as the voice) in opposition to the synthesized and digitized music that frames it. Arthur Kroker notes that "until now, sound has usually been in the background. Digital music is different. It foregrounds sound by making problematic the energy field of noise, reenchanting the ear and projecting complex sound objects outward into imaginary shapes, volumes, and liquid flows" (Spasm 47). While he is speaking specifically of music by Steve Gibson and himself, which is much closer in shape and definition to that of Skinny Puppy and Ministry than NIN, his conception that digital music has led to the rethinking of the perception of objects, bodies, and their corresponding sounds is congruent with what is at work in Reznor's music. Because the digital technology repositions "organic" and mechanic sound within a computerized framework, the link between performer, instrument, and listener becomes uncertain, for the referent cannot be fully defined spatially in the way a work of Beethoven can be imagined according to the position of the orchestra. As a result, the "organic" connotations of the voice and those of the guitar, bass, and drums (which rock and roll codes align with the body of the musician) are merged with the computerized framework that positions every sound within an uncertain and undefined "cyberspace." It is this very uncertainty which Reznor employs as the guiding force behind his musical narrative. By exploiting the blurring of human and machinic sounds -- such as the sampled torture sounds on "Mr. Self Destruct" (which Reznor took from George Lucas' science fiction film THX 1138 (4)); and the artificial heartbeat that opens "Closer" -- Reznor is articulating in musical terms the very ambiguity which structures such synergistic movements.

Eric Weisbard of The Village Voice writes that the downward spiral is "a themed set of songs about a horribly alienated protagonist who tries sex, religion, drugs, and whatnot, takes his life, then sings a song and a half from the beyond" (83). There are two figures in this drama -- I and You -- although to what extent these figures are unified characters is hard to gather. Although I is the narrator and controls what is said, that figure must depend upon You (personified in the music) for the ability to gain access to speech. The tension that results is the musical and narrative structure, both aggressive and passive, projective and abjected. The album begins with the sounds of a whip cracking onto a grunting human body. From this point on, the narrator weaves his own personal search for redemption across denunciations of god, religion, politics, phallic power, sexuality, and violence, all of which seem coupled with an insistent desire to break beyond the boundaries which restrict bodies, ideologies, and subjectivities. These themes, while evoked lyrically, are mirrored musically in the continual blurring of "natural" and "artificial" sounds, suggesting a technological setting that figures the body of the narrator at odds with the very industrial sounds which surround him.

The best example of this is the song "Closer." The music begins with 20 seconds of synthesized heartbeats; then the principle rhythmic theme (centered around the bass note of C) emerges simultaneous with the vocals, as if to surround them. Reznor sings, "you let me violate you / you let me desecrate you," which seems aggressive, yet positions You as the agent in control of I's actions. Soon after, Reznor sings, "help me I broke apart my insides," which suggests both a desire to connect with the outside world and an overwhelming fear that I is losing its "self," is merging with everything else. The need to affirm subjectivity is crucial, most expressed in the brutal lines, "I want to fuck you like an animal / I want to feel you from the inside," which reverse I's status from passive to aggressive because it violently configures You as other. What is more, there is a decided musical shift at the word "animal." The primary rhythm is supplanted by a more aggressive, grinding bass which, while maintaining the common theme, drops it down a fifth (to an F), in order to reflect the agentival shift from You to I that the line connotes. While the assertion to "fuck you like an animal" suggests an empowered "self," the following line, "I want to feel you from the in side," implies a certain tension in this shift, for it posits You as container of the very thing which will empower I and subsequently resolve the musical conflict. This tension is further delineated when the narrator says, "My whole existence is flawed," reinforcing the inability of that violent act to fully reveal the "inside" of You, followed by the line, "you get me closer to god," at which point the music returns to its initial theme, although now the music rises, in a transcendental-like move, in a move that corresponds musically to the verbal articulation of "god."

This narrative can be read as a desire for the self to find its significance within another's body. That the key word in this song is "fuck" indicates to what extent this acquisition of power (5) is sexually determined. To specifically use sexuality as the agent for the acquisition of power in the chorus closely aligns the narrative with psychoanalytic theory, where the Oedipal desire to unify one's "self" is manifest in the drive to incorporate the other within one's own body, thereby "fixing" the "lack" the other's presence reveals. This is most clearly expressed in the line "you get me closer to god," where the word "god" acts as an objet à, an "encounter with the real" which stands in for an idealized and totalized "whole" that cannot be expressed in "the network of signifiers" that construct language (Lacan 52). Lacan, in fact, notes that, "The gods belong to the field of the real" (45), suggesting that one could read I's god as a metaphor for an inexpressible field of immanence -- a place longed for yet never attained within representational boundaries. Rather than configuring a movement beyond the limitations of language, I is locked into a spiraling fluctuation between the words "animal" and "god," between the desire to express one's own subjectivity by aggressively asserting physical dominance over another and the desire to break beyond the limitations imposed upon the subject by the physical.

The desire to articulate pain, moreover, emerges musically in the tension between violently asserting oneself and the inability to move to a space beyond this assertion. When the word god institutes a move back to the initial bass note of C, the aggressive "animalistic" movement is thwarted by a return to an initial movement before the pain of the narrator is fully expressed. This cycle of expression and repression repeats itself, albeit with slight variations, in the second verse and chorus; yet at the second god, as the music returns to the initial movement, the lyrics abruptly end. There follows an extended musical section where the themes of aggression and repression are enacted by driving the music into higher and higher registers, only to fall back within a continual circulation around the major theme. While the vocals do return at one point, along with a hint of the "animalistic" chorus, they are buried beneath a large mass of technological force, suggesting the overriding power which technology holds in this narrative, for it is only through the electronic music that the body itself can find its significance. Nevertheless, even the music cannot finally "break through" its own structure, and sputters to a conclusion by repeating the While many see this technological dependence negatively -- as a potential threat to the loss of human agency -- Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein see it as acting within a concept of "humanity" that is historically determined. In their view, our current cultural situation is significant because "we finally encounter the end of (human) history and the beginning of virtual history," where "the delirium of the recline of western civilization is experienced as both the ecstasy of crash culture and the catastrophe of our burn-out in digital culture" (Data Trash 2). By aligning this technological transformation of culture with the fall of "western civilization," virtual history can be read as an anglophilic reaction to an ever-increasing multicultural environment where the dominance of European and North American men (one of whom being Trent Reznor) is in jeopardy. Kroker and Weinstein find their "theory of the virtual class" in what they term "the will to virtuality," which borrows from Nietzsche's "will to power," and "is grounded in the fascination with technology as a reaction-formation to the death wish" (163), an insistent desire to "trash" human flesh in favor of "virtualized flesh," which "can finally know itself as a pacific dreamland of violent irruptions: flickering from red to blue in the color spectrum as it searches for an infinite (technical) perfection that it will never attain" (36).

To wholly embrace technology is to hope for a way out of our own bodies, to attain the frontier of the digital superhighway, a space which will finally destroy the limitations imposed upon human bodies. The problem, however, is that once the body enters this space, the same drives -- the "death wishes," the fears, desires, and anxieties -- will all retain their hold upon bodies (cyber or otherwise), and will continually force these "virtual" subjects into the same (7) -- he nevertheless cannot escape the musical structure that codifies and restricts one's movement toward a Heideggerian sense of "Being" or a Lacanian "Real." What sets Reznor apart from his industrial counterparts, however, is his awareness of this dilemma, the fact that he recognizes his inability to move "beyond" the musical codes in his possession. Rather than seeking to break down hegemonic codes, Reznor instead pushes them to their Oedipalized extremes, thereby foregrounding the anxiety at work in the production of narrative.

the downward spiral redefines the conception of the human body by pushing it beyond the realm of corporeal or Cartesian "reality" into a cyberspace where the screams, moans, and cries emitted by I fuse with and filter into the music's structure. This transmogrification is nowhere more prevalent than on "The Becoming." The song narrates a fusion between I and an external body that (alone among all the tracks) has a name, Annie. As in "Closer," the tension at work in this song is markedly felt in the ambivalent relationship between the vocals and the music. The song begins with a looping motif, which is a melodic line seemingly constructed out of electronic blips and beeps. Soon the motif builds with the addition of a heavy drumbeat and a circular swarm of moans and screams that emerge and fuse with the rhythm. The lyrics, which begin shortly after the screams, are centered upon establishing the interconnection between the narrator and an unidentified object, which seems to be machine, as the line, "I beat my machine it's a part of me it's inside of me," would suggest. For much of the song, the music and the lyrics are in synch -- the rhythmic screams, the driving drums, and the synthetic melody remain consistent, while the voice continually elaborates I's position in a nether world between human flesh and an uncertain cyberspace. While the narrator states, "I am becoming," and the "the me that you know is now made up of wires," thereby echoing the cyber-fusion of his body to an electronic You, there is still a push to break away and reemerge in the "natural" world. What is more, the protagonist exclaims, "I don't want to listen but it's all too clear," suggesting that the music itself is the force that drives this virtual universe.

The desire to escape the wires that bind the body within the machine is most felt in the musical shift that occurs halfway into the song, where the rhythm and melody abruptly stop and an acoustic guitar (echoing the melodic theme) emerges, bringing with it the "organic" connotations of that instrument. It is not surprising that, in this interlude, the narrator calls out to the tangible figure of "Annie," who would appear to represent both a desired release from this terrifying realm as well as a sexual object through which the narrator can articulate a "human" existence for himself. As in "Closer" and the crucial phrase "I want to fuck you like an animal," sexual imagery here reinforces a drive toward self-definition, a need to call out, overpower, or otherwise gain acknowledgment from another in order to control one's own voice. Here, the acoustic guitar echoes the song's principal motif in a spatially defined way (images of musicians with guitars can be coded onto the sound of such an instrument), so that it is able to convey the pain of the previous section because it codes the motif of that section in "human" terms. The expression of "self" here, however, is a momentary respite that is quickly destroyed when the guitar disappears and the principal rhythmic and melodic motif is reinstated -- only now instead of "human" screams the beat is composed of digitized blips and grinding noises. Likewise, as the spiraling motif intensifies, the lines, "it won't give up it wants me dead / goddamn this noise inside my head," are repeated over and over at an increasingly intensified pitch, suggesting that the music itself and the digital noise that comprises it, has become a mechanism for the production of pain in the narrator's body.

In all, this song delineates the confrontation between human and electronic bodies. As the final lines are repeated, there is an increased amount of digital distortion in both the music and the voice, so that with each successive articulation of the refrain the words lose more of their shape, until they, too, become noise. What emerges in this section is the very "becoming" which the title of the song suggests. Deleuze and Guattari use the term "becoming" to suggest a way in which bodies traverse, intersect, and interpenetrate various "planes of consistency," further and further blurring the borders between bodies, organs, organisms, and subjectivities. As they say, "Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard" (252). By further and further pushing "desiring machines" into virtual borderlands between digital and organic delineation, Reznor enacts a becoming-imperceptible by heightening the abstraction of articulable discourse and sonic chaos.

The reading of "The Becoming" as breaking outside totalitarian boundaries is mediated by the final few bars of the song, where the chaos subsides, and the acoustic guitar reappears, repeating the primary motif (sans vocals), until the song is abruptly replaced by the next track, which is ironically titled "I Do Not Want This." This conclusion can be read as a codification of the narrative within the borders of traditional musical structure, for it reinstigates the primary motif, "naturalizes" it through the acoustic guitar, and thereby reifies the "harmony" which "music" affirms. As an ending, however, is complicated in two ways. First, the vocals (the body of the narrator) do not return, a point which suggests a musical annihilation of the organic body or at least the loss of representability on the part of the narrator -- You has wholly overwhelmed I. Second, the song (as such) has no coda, no conclusion, no finality; instead, it becomes yet another digitized narrative, which furthers the themes of anxiety and the yearning for transcendence which mark most of the other songs on the downward spiral. As a result of this, I would suggest that one of the main structuring points -- a force that keeps the music moving forward -- is the deferment caused by the inability to resolve the tension at work in the aggressive and terrorizing narrative. For this reason, the final song, "Hurt," is crucial in offering a comprehensive understanding of the album's overall structure.

"Hurt" begins with what sounds like a faint wind, but is in fact closer to the static hissing of a computer or other electronic device. The hiss remains (muted) in the background as a keyboard motif and a stumbling vocal emerges, out of synch with one another, as though (because this song is supposed to be narrating the "after-life") there is a fundamental imbalance in the control either the music or the voice has over one another. The narrator says, "I hurt myself today / to see if I still feel." As this narrator continues to express his pain, the music gains in intensity when a guitar enters and the synthetic wind rises in pitch. The scene of death is expressly mentioned in the phrases "my empire of dirt" and "I wear my crown of shit," both suggesting a buried body or an abject space. Halfway into the song, however, the monotone yet painful sound bursts out, as the vocals cry, "what have I become?" while drums emerge, like a newly-discovered heartbeat. The hissing grows in strength as the narrator lifts the song upward, as though rising from the dead, longing for another chance, promising that "if I could start again...I would keep myself / I would find a way" -- although a destination (to what?) is not mentioned. Again, as in the previous songs on the album, there is a continuous tension at work in the desire to express one's self and a desire to fall back within the technological dominance of the music, as if this alone will provide an escape. The tension is further frustrated by the music's own propulsion to expend or destroy any attempts to move outside its own limitations. In the end of the song, just as I proclaims "I would find a way" and supposedly resolve the anxieties pervading the entire album, the music suddenly breaks down -- the guitar that was scattered in the background emerges in the foreground as feedback, and the keyboard disappears in the electronic hissing that overwhelms any conceivable attempt by the narrator to finish the sentence, and subsequently remains as the last vestiges of the song, spiraling out of control in a digital haze.

"Hurt" ends like the other songs on the downward spiral -- sputtering to a halt, half-heartedly embracing traditional musical conventions as if Reznor himself were incapable of conforming fully to the ideologies such structures assert. NIN endings can be explained in many different ways. Perhaps Reznor is reacting to the very anti-commodification tendencies which are so cherished by "industrial" fans and musicians; perhaps he holds a decided (8) (84). Weisbard's desire to read Reznor's music as not making the "extra effort" to resolve and contain his songs might be on the mark in the arena of political economy, but his language (especially the words, "yet another") suggests that this inability to make "greatness" is standard for Reznor's oeuvre. On the contrary, in his other music -- such as "Head Like a Hole," "Wish," and the 1994 song "Burn," from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack -- Reznor does not have difficulty fitting his musical articulations into standardized frameworks. What makes the downward spiral different from most pop music (including Reznor's own), is owing to the thematic link Reznor makes between his own music and the cultural anxiety which technology and its depletion of human agency produce in contemporary society. Reznor's body, figured as it is between the noise of his computerized instruments and the narratives of pain, terror, and hatred, becomes the site through which the anxiety of technology is played out. In many ways, one could see this album alongside Kroker's notion of "modernism," which is principally conditioned by nostalgia. As he says, "Modernism is the state of feeling and at last of merely wanting to feel the phantom organ of totality" (Data Trash 43). In songs like "Closer," "The Becoming," and "Hurt," Reznor expresses the pathetic (Gr. pathos, melancholic, affecting suffering) desire to push himself into an unknown and unnameable totality that he does not understand. Reznor's "unknown," here, is the very technology which propels his music through his quest. Within this "transcendental" framework, however, Reznor is able to effectively propel this fear and fascination with technology into a commentary on a culture's obsession with machines. Reznor's music -- its narratives of fear and desire articulated within a computerized framework of noise, screams, and drum programming -- positions technology as the product of societal impulses to resolve all anxieties within a cyberspace of dead flesh, programmed minds, and totalitarian control.

Notes

1. Two events are linked to the cultural image of Trent Reznor. The first occurred at Woodstock '94, where he and his hired bandmates took the stage covered in mud, a move that was seen at the time to be a show of support for the rain-soaked and equally mud-drenched fans in the audience. Once onstage, Reznor kicked microphones and keyboards in every direction, tripped his guitarist, and (at several points) dove into the audience. The set, many said, was the highlight of an otherwise dreary festival. The second event occurred in June of 1995, when recently declared Presidential candidate Sen. Robert Dole and former Drug Czar William Bennett, among others, attacked Time-Warner Industries for selling and promoting "obscene" and "morally degrading" works by such artists as Ice-T, Tupac Shakur, Oliver Stone, and Nine Inch Nails. According to Time magazine (Richard Zoglin, "A Company Under Fire,"June 12, 1995, 37-39), Bennett met with Time-Warner executives and asked them to read aloud the lyrics to Reznor's "Big Man With a Gun," at which time Time-Warner chair, Gerald Levin, left the room.

2. A feat further heightened by the video for the song, where Reznor is tangled up in miles of recording tape, thrashing about and singing as if to escape the onslaught of the technology that (musically) surrounds him.

3. This particular video is part of a larger concept video for the broken EP. The narrative runs as so: A young man is shown being bound, gagged, strapped into a chair, and forced to watch Nine Inch Nails videos, which then appear in sequence. After each video, the young man is shown, still watching, as another man systematically cuts off his ears, arms, legs, penis, and various internal organs. broken, consequently, has never been released -- and, according to Reznor, never will be.

4. The movie takes place in this self-enclosed environment, wholly controlled by the computers which surround the people, who take tranquilizing drugs to keep them numb and (hence) better able to perform the mindlessly repetitive jobs to which they are assigned. The scene in question occurs when the main character, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) is channel surfing on a wall-sized television. Each channel plays a different program that is repeated over and over again. One of the channels shows a large black man beating a smaller white man with a whip. Both are naked.

5. In the video for this song, and when the song is played on the radio, the word "fuck" is replaced by a momentary silence in the music. This produces an uncanny reaction on the part of the listener, who (one would assume) knows what the censored word is, yet is prevented from hearing it because of moral or religious restrictions on particular language in the mass media. Rather than silencing the word "fuck," however, the silencing of the narrative at this point winds up drawing one's attention directly to this unspoken word, giving it more resonance than it would have if they had simply left the song alone.

6. This is played out in the video in a shot of Reznor's body, hovering (seemingly) in mid-air, as he strokes the keys on a Gothic-esque organ.

7. Reznor's use of the guitar is significant. Before pretty hate machine came out, few industrial groups bothered with the instrument, preferring to stick with the synthesizer and other computer-enhanced instruments. Reznor's use of the guitar on that album and the followup, broken, effectively broke down the barrier that separated industrial from punk and metal -- helping, in other words, to redefine the genres as they were seen by fans and critics alike. While the guitar is less important to the downward spiral, it does emerge significantly in songs like "March of the Pigs" and "The Becoming," although occupying a very different (and more ambiguous) position than that seen in NIN's previous albums.

8. Weisbard adds: "Is there therapy for freeing the inner rock star?" (84)

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