Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (10 page)

Today Youngstown’s 80,000 residents are the poorest urban people in the country.
⁵¹
As a result of the community’s desperation for investment in the past two decades, four new prisons have been built in the area. In 2002, Youngstown State University got together with the city to devise a comprehensive city plan, the first since 1974. The first point of the plan is to “accept that Youngstown is a smaller city” and
shrink its footprint through demolitions and greening of disused property.
⁵²
This is an imperative in a place where for 30 years no one dealt with the abandoned homes and crumbling roads that were built to serve twice the current population. In neighborhoods like Brier Hill, which once stood at the gates of the mills, so few old folk remain on property that the city wants to turn back to open land. Most of their neighbors’ homes were burned or torn down long ago.

As part of the revitalization effort, Youngstown got its first professional sports team, part of the Central Hockey League, in 2005. The team was given the name Steelhounds as effigy. The Hounds lasted for three seasons before being kicked out of the CHL for non-payment of dues. The Labor Museum, too, is suffering: continuous cutbacks in Ohio Historical Society budgets are forcing lesser-used facilities to close. The authors of the 2008 book
Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization
suggest that the museum’s focus on the closings might be part of the problem, writing, “The political strategy of emphasizing victimization over resistance and loss over defiance may be politically self-defeating as well as historically inaccurate.”
⁵³

And we, the weirdos, nerds, and punks who loved our city but were disgusted or dismayed by its rot, we agreed that there was something deeply wrong about Youngstown’s choices of what to remember and what to forget, what it was proud of and what it banished from sight. But things were too far gone, and it was painful, distant, and taboo to speak of, let alone try to fix. So we left, we buried, we forgot. But not all of us.

NIN248, 21, Mercer, Pennsylvania

NIN248 and I met online in 2006 and traded IM and MySpace messages for three years. In addition to talking about Nine Inch Nails, he liked to chat about his obsession with cars and how he planned to pursue school for automotive high performance once he got out of high school. During that time, his online persona went from representing rabid NIN fandom to something more traceless in inverse proportion to the amount of material he was posting about his new girlfriend, whom he suddenly professed to be his whole reason for existence. We lost contact before we could complete our interview.

The first NIN music I heard was
Pretty Hate Machine
. I was 13. It was through my friend Joel. I went to his house and he had a VHS tape of a NIN tour. My first impressions were iffy, but then we went on his computer and he had the “Hurt” video of Trent in his studio playing piano, and I fell in love with the band.

My dad was influential to my listening. I guess I had shitty taste in music. I liked random stuff like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, so he showed me some stoner rock, as in Nirvana and shit like that. He was really into the seventies. He has all the Beatles albums and a lot of heavy metal. My mom is the complete opposite of my dad and me. She likes country and Jesus music. My mom goes to church a lot, and my dad and I don’t. She understands that I don’t believe in God. She tried to convince me, until I told her that nothing she was going to say would change my beliefs. I waited for close to a year after I stopped to tell her, actually. I don’t believe in God that much.

I think Trent was having a tough time in life during the release of
PHM
. When he has problems with emotions, he lets everyone know about it through his music. With that album, I think he was aiming for something new and fresh. That’s why he has sold millions of copies. He pushes past what everyone else is doing.

I don’t think Trent has a real issue with the music industry, but I think he has a huge problem with the way the United States is dealing with things over in Iraq and with politics in general. I totally agree with him, too. It’s fucking bullshit.

In town, there are a few screamo, kinda grunge bands. They all play in their attics or basements. People play at two places, usually: Curtis Elementary School, which is an abandoned school, and a Chinese restaurant in Grove City, Sun Gins. I don’t like going to shows because there are always emo kids who sit on the sidewalks and smoke cigarettes and complain about everything, and there are little 13-year-old girls who try to fit in. They don’t even go inside; they just sit out there and act cool.

There were shows every other week, but lately there hasn’t been that many because Sun Gins raised the rental
price, and the production company, New Noise Productions, can’t afford it. Still, there are bands that tour around the country that come to play. Signal Home played last night. The shows are roomy, with a good vibe. Everyone gets along. They usually start at 6:30 or 7. People from, like, a 60-mile radius come to the shows.

I play guitar and drums, which I learned on my own. Marilyn Manson and Pink Floyd were a major inspiration to me for a couple of years, but NIN has stuck with me for a long time. I was in a grunge/ambient noise band with harmonics and delay and a little singing, but it never turned into anything. I played one show, at Sun Gins. It was really hot, but it was fun.

Graduation was good. Kind of miss those high school days, but it’s time to move on with my life. I worked at GameStop for a year or so but then went off to college in Pittsburgh. That lasted three months, and now I’m back. But I hardly even stay here anymore. I usually go to Hermitage, Pennsylvania, with my car buddies and hang out and cause some mischief. Life is quiet in this town, but it has its little secrets and gossip. No matter what, every single person knows what happens to everyone. I lost 35 pounds and everyone thought I got addicted to drugs. It is completely ridiculous.

I love the instrumentals from Trent. They’re relaxing to listen to while driving down a road aimlessly.
The Fragile
has always been my favorite. Trent used such amazing orchestrations and had such deep intentions with this album. “The Day the Whole World Went Away” is probably the most heart-filled song I have ever heard. My favorite lyrics come from “All the Love in the World,” though: “Watching all the insects march along/Seem to know just right where they belong/ Smears a face reflecting in the chrome/ Hiding in the crowd, I’m all alone.”

Ric, 26, Hubbard, Ohio

Ric is the best friend and bandmate of my former guitar teacher.
We met on a few occasions, once in a coffee shop in his hometown.
Ric talked straight into the microphone, and at the end of the interview picked it up to thank Trent for helping him get where he is today.

I remember the day I bought
Pretty Hate Machine
, probably in 1992. My mom took me to Underdog Records and I saw
Broken
and I saw
PHM
. I remember flipping the CDs over and seeing that
Broken
had six songs and
PHM
had all kinds of songs, so I bought that.

My stepmother was convinced that my music was the music of the devil. She was 19 years old, only a few years older than me when she and my dad got married. My dad was an atheist, but my stepmother and her family were insane born-again Christians. She was on this power trip because she had gotten someone like me under her control. So I had
two CD collections: Christian music, and what I really loved at my mom’s house.

I used to have to stay up super-late when my parents were asleep because MTV was forbidden, and I’d want to catch
Headbangers Ball
. I always used to pretend to write videos in my mind, because I couldn’t hang out. I was extremely sheltered by my family and church. I wasn’t allowed to go to parties or after-school events. I’d just go home and listen to music. But on one of those nights, “Wish” came on.

I was young and naive when I gave my life to God in a play called
Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames
. The whole play is about people dying and either going to heaven or hell. I became a Christian out of fear of going to hell, not learning about the love of God. I started going to church, to youth group, and then it started snowballing. I became super-Christian. I wasn’t watching PG-13 movies. I wasn’t masturbating—well, I was trying not to, I did it all the time, but I would always get mad at myself. It was similar to listening to music that you weren’t supposed to. It was forbidden, but it felt pleasurable, so I would do it anyway.

The church was fundamentalist. The story of Jonah and the Whale—they believed that
really
happened.

The pastor was making us into a crazy army of Christians at war with the devil. I hated my dad because my dad didn’t believe in God. I couldn’t be friends with anyone who wasn’t a Christian because they’d take me down. The more I gave up, the higher I’d be looked up to in the church. If I were to say, “I used to listen to all those CDs, but you know what I did? I burned them,” everyone in church would say, “That’s a good, strong Christian.”
The Downward Spiral
was the one CD that I could not get rid of. I really loved
Broken
and
PHM
, but I burned them. In their place, there were Christian bands that were just rip-offs of bands out at the time. There
was a Christian NIN called Klank. To kids who loved NIN, these Christians were like, “Yeah, they’re cool, but check these guys out: they talk about God.” It was a weird parallel world.

I started opening my mind, asking, What is heaven? Who is God? And then I retaliated in a really angry way. That’s when NIN hit me the hardest. I started finally realizing I was an all right guy. First I was angry at everybody, then it turned into absolute hatred toward God, toward religion, and the church. “Hey God, why are you doing this to me?/Am I not living up to what I’m supposed to be?” I think if anybody in the universe were going to feel what Trent was saying there, it would be me.

At first I felt alone because I had been trying so hard and still failed God. Then I felt like I turned my back on God, and my friends thought I was crazy. I was an outcast. But I think that through listening to
PHM, The Fragile
, and
Broken
, I really felt like, There’s somebody else who’s been through this, and that I wasn’t so strange for being so angry. After that, it was a process of self-repair. I said, I’m going to live by my morals, which my mom and dad instilled in me before they split. NIN was the main rebuilding influence. Trent felt the same way, and music was his way of venting. Songs like “Heresy” and “Happiness in Slavery” were his ways of dealing with it.

The day I stopped believing in God was the day I bought
The Fragile
. I was 18 and dating this girl who was a supreme born-again Christian. Her family was 10,000 times worse than mine. They thought she was this princess of heaven and I was this bum. We battled throughout our year-and-a-half relationship because she said I was not as good of a Christian as I thought.

She went on this summer mission trip to Israel. When she returned, I went to the airport with her family to pick
her up, and she was ice to me. She gave me a four-page letter of all the things I had to do if we were going to be together, like becoming a stronger Christian. I got home and cried. After a couple of weeks, she started being into me again, but then I found out that while she was on the trip, she had been hooking up with some guy. I went to her house and said, “If you have anything else to tell me about what happened between the two of you, you’d better let me know right now, because you will never speak to me again.”

That day I had bought
The Fragile
. After I put it on, and by the time “We’re in This Together Now” came on, I was not a Christian. “It’s funny how everything you swore would never change is different now.” It was like all of a sudden my room collapsed in on me, but then there was somebody there pulling me out. And it was Trent Reznor. The next day, I was at a friend’s house playing video games, something I was previously forbidden to do. I had been in a coma, and I just woke up.

I think after
The Fragile
, which is my
The Wall
, I really began to love NIN as a whole. I saw NIN live and they started with “Terrible Lie,” so I went back to rediscover
PHM
. I remember when I first heard it, I liked that I didn’t know what was going on. I liked listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and knowing there was a bass player, guitarist, singer, and drummer. With NIN, I was like, How will the live show be? Is there going to be a guy rattling a box of chains, another with a trumpet, and someone with a garbage lid? At the time I was also listening to Nirvana’s
Nevermind
and all these formulaic radio and MTV rock bands. NIN was something completely different.

My friend Jason and I were known for sneaking out at parties. We used to sit in his car and listen to this NIN mixtape. We’d stare at the stars and have long conversations about what we thought
The Fragile
was about. “Something I
Can Never Have” was huge to us. It was that phrase: “I just want something I can never have.” How brutally honest is that? What kind of person can admit that?

Like with my band. I wanted to be this famous, super-rock star, but that was something that could never happen with that band. To admit that was hard. I was in a relationship with a fantastic girl, but I screwed up and she left, and I thought, Why can’t I not fuck up? Can I not be faithful? Maybe that’s another reason I relate to Trent, because I guess sometimes I don’t look at what I’m doing to others. I sort of blame other people, like God. At the time, I never thought of it in those terms, but then again … I’m also a guy. I wasn’t looking at the love aspect of Trent’s music; I was listening to it more for the rage I felt. I wanted to be this big rock star, this super-spiritual leader. I wanted that power to make up for the inadequacy I felt about myself, you know?