Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (2 page)

Moral panics often provoke disproportionate responses, and one effect of Columbine was an aggressive set of policies for monitoring teens in schools. Across the United States, high schools were fitted with metal detectors, surveillance, and a police presence.
¹²
A number of schools took up antibul-lying measures but at the same time instituted zero-tolerance policies
¹³
that profiled students who were thought likely to be violent. Such policies targeted kids who publicly confessed despair or anger, or who merely wore shirts of bands that expressed those emotions.

Anyone under 18 with a trench coat and/or a heavy music collection was put on notice. A generation of outcasts who’d found beauty, solace, and community through dark music and aesthetics were pushed into the spotlight and labeled dangerous. Ten years after Nine Inch Nails’
Pretty Hate Machine
, in the midst of a mainstream moment for the goth and industrial subculture that the band had nurtured, young people suddenly felt pressure to bury their feelings, change their looks, take their fandom underground, and silence their sounds.

The history of Columbine haunts this book, and there are four things in the Trench Coat Mafia narrative that contribute to its framework. First, the media panic around
Columbine revealed something when it named Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and KMFDM as the music of violence in the nineties: the profound genre shifts in the music scapegoating of the past 30 years. “Satanic” bands like Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest represented the fears of the seventies, while sexually explicit pop stars like Prince were the mid-eighties devils to the Parents Music Resource Center. By the nineties, rap artists like 2 Live Crew and Snoop Dogg had become the locus of panic. It was only for a brief moment, inspired by Nothing Records, that rock-derived music returned to shock the masses. That Columbine happened in the middle of Manson’s “Death of Rock” tour only boosted what may have been the last time the genre had enough mainstream audience to pose a moral threat.

A second part of the Trench Coat Mafia image is that it was powerful for its costume. The trench coat was part of British military dress, and became ubiquitous in middle-class men’s fashion by the 1930s. It’s the city kin of the duster, the floor-length jacket that was the de facto uniform of the Old West. Both the duster and the trench came to be anachronistic alternatives to the more sporty, casual men’s fashion in the postwar era. The long lines and militaristic functionality are equal parts fancy dress and menace. The trench was adopted in the more experimental edges of post-punk, especially by those bands that explored the psychology of horror through fascist deadpan, like Joy Division, and it went on to become central to the “rivethead” style of industrial. Goth and metal fans too have adopted the trench as part of a costume.

In other words, the trench gives nerds a way to look badass. The long coat is integral in the worlds of film, comics, and sci-fi as well: the cape of the outsider or antihero in a dystopian underworld, whether hard-boiled reality, lawless frontier, or technologically oversaturated future. The trench
appears regularly in comics, especially those inspired by pulp fiction, such as
Dick Tracy, The Spirit, Sin City
and
Hellboy
, and on the character of John Constantine, who is based on Sting. (Eerily, the first issue in DC Comics’
The Trenchcoat Brigade
series arrived the month before Columbine.) Noir films used the trench extensively to show the private eye as anonymous outcast, and neo-noir took up the coat for characters in films from
Blade Runner
(1982) to
Batman
(1989).
The Crow
(1994) brought the trench into its 1990s gothic incarnation, and only a month before Columbine, the trench became programmer chic in
The Matrix.

Reznor was not only a musical icon for his fans, but a stylistic one. His ghostly pallor, lank black hair, combat boots, fishnet stockings, and rail-thin body prone to aggressive, drastic gestures were admired and idealized as an alternative form of bodily grace.
¹⁴
Although Trent was more fond of sleeveless shirts onstage and leather jackets off, he wore the trench too, first as fetish gear in his earliest press photos, then as Victorian fop in the 1996 “Perfect Drug” video. Ominously, he also wore it when he played the gun-mad Yank whom David Bowie fears in the 1997 video for “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

Columbine also stood for the further demonization of extreme-music fans not as realists, cynics, or depressives but as latent criminals. This seriously impacted the lives of fans and others who looked the part of the goth into the 2000s, and colors the way older fans speak about their involvement with the music. Yet it is not a crime, or even a symptom, to seek out and support art that engages with darkness and existential drama. It wasn’t even a crime when Dylan Klebold did it (he referred to his depression as “the Downward Spiral”), yet the shame and suspicion cast upon goths took a decidedly juridical tone after Columbine.

Finally, the media’s Trench Coat Mafia myth grouped the disaffected into a conspiratorial mass. The two killers’ grand plan set them apart from earlier school shooters and made it seem that they were part of some larger underworld, a “mafia” all too real. It added another layer of antiheroic chic to the story, linking Harris and Klebold with a network whose codes—lyrics, online culture, video games—were unintelligible to adult society. But by the nineties, the term
mafia
was being used freely as a metaphor for any strong, stylish, masculine outlaw culture, like those of rap. For the trench-coat kids too it was a way to boast of their circle as something apart: that its rituals, exclusivity, and strong bonds made it more like a family.

When I call Nine Inch Nails fans a trench coat mafia, it is to this end: to reclaim the term for a historically situated symbolic community. For serious fans, Nine Inch Nails is a real community. They are linked through this network to Trent Reznor, their musical idol, hero, role model, or creative inspiration. With the world of NIN music as the central node, they also connect with one another, becoming a group by sharing information about the band and the world as viewed through it. With NIN drawing together and fostering suburban skeptics, fan discussion often turns to social differences, political dissent, and heresy. These are Nine Inch Nails fans’ “family values.”

By his own admission, Trent Reznor makes music that appeals to this group because he was part of its preceding generation:
a lonely prog-rock nerd raised in a nontraditional household in small-town America. In 2000,
Revolver
magazine offered Reznor the chance to talk with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. To get things started, the magazine asked Reznor how Waters’ music affected his life, and he responded:

I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania.… I was in high school at the time, and I remember that music had always been my friend — a companion, the brother I didn’t have, or whatever.… I came from a broken home. I was alone a lot as a child. And when
The Wall
came out, that record seemed very personal to me, even though I was in a completely different lifestyle, place, and situation than Roger would have been at that time. I’d never heard music that had that sort of naked, honest emotion. I had that sense of, “Wow, I’m not the only person who feels this way.”
¹⁵

How Nine Inch Nails came to leave a similar impression on its fans is what I wish to trace in this book. Too often fandom is seen as a form of hysteria: dangerous or pathological, an adolescent phase, unproductive beyond encouraging consumption. As the fans profiled in this book will show, fandom can be a deep, complex, lifelong way to shape one’s values and sense of self.

This project was inspired by the work of Daniel Cavicchi, whose book
Tramps Like Us
(1998) shows how Bruce Springsteen fans produce meaning in their lives through the works and stories of a band. Like Cavicchi, I was a fan before I became a scholar, and I came to realize that every
step of this project would be a process of self-recognition as well as discovery. My project is a humanistic one, asking how Nine Inch Nails helps its fans make sense of life. This is neither a music critic’s argument for a band’s greatness nor a historian’s case for the significance of the subject’s actions. This book is not much concerned with Nine Inch Nails’ “goodness”—sonic traces showing the net worth of Trent’s talents, his bandmates, his gear, his training, his collaborations—as much as it is with the ethics of Nine Inch Nails’ musical world. This book argues that while Nine Inch Nails’ music can be revolutionary—even as it sits on the shelf at the mall—the meaning and import come from the lived experiences of individuals. I, the author voice I, am one more individual in this project—a critical, scholarly, feminist writer, but also one person—and from many other arguments I build my argument. None of them are
the
truth.

Like Mozart, Nine Inch Nails has a customized system of opus dating. Albums are called “halos,” and
Pretty Hate Machine
is Halo 2. Like many older Nine Inch Nails fans, my favorite album is Halo 8, 1994’s
The Downward Spiral
(those born after 1980 tend to prefer Halo 14,
The Fragile
). But I chose
Pretty Hate Machine
, released in October 1989, as the subject for this book because it served as an important node in the messy moment between the Reagan eighties and alterna nineties. It arrived before and helped create a change in rock-derived American popular music that demanded a new record-industry logic, one that by 1994 was a smoothly operating machine.

PHM
also allowed me to tell the story of lower-middle-class white men in the Rust Belt through a narrative beginning with Trent’s birth and leading to the album’s birth, as a mirror of American transition from Industrial to Information Age labor. One account of
Pretty Hate Machine
origin supposes that it was a teenage symphony to Satan made by an aggro Brian Wilson alone at night on synths in a Cleveland, Ohio, studio. The question here is not if that story is true, but why it is important to fans that it could be. What does this story of
Pretty Hate Machine
tell us about the world at that time? How did the story of Trent Reznor become a story of solo technological genius giving voice to anger and loneliness, and for whom did these stories resonate? The first chapter, The Becoming, addresses these questions.

The bulk of this book is devoted to oral histories conducted between 2006–2008 of longtime Nine Inch Nails fans born and raised in the very regions where the album, its creator, and the author of this book come from: Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, and Mercer, Pennsylvania. The book contains ten chapters of fan’s words as framed through the songs of
Pretty Hate Machine
. Each song chapter presents a life story of a man no older than Reznor (1965) and no younger than
PHM
(1989). That these stories are all of Euro-American working- and middle-class men is a coincidence turned into a strategy. I went searching for multiplicity, but what I found was that the active female NIN fans (far fewer in number than men) were unwilling to publicly discuss their fandom. In the process I had to write myself out of the song chapters and into the chapter about the city of Youngstown. While I never screened my participants by race or ethnicity, I always came across their Euro-American heritage in the course of meeting or discussion. Targeting African-American or Latina/o NIN fans seemed disingenuous because they are a distinct minority of Rust Belt area fans. (I highly encourage readers to check out Laina Dawes’ forthcoming book on African-American and Afro-Canadian metal fans,
What Are You Doing Here? Black Women in Metal and Hardcore
, and
to see William E. Jones’ 2004 documentary
Is It Really So Strange?
on L.A.’s Latina/o Smiths fans, to get a larger sense of what alternative rock fandom is like for people of color.) With the white male subjects I settled on, I conducted in-person and online interviews and edited the transcripts into narratives. (My questions were inspired by George Lipsitz and Hazel Carby and form bears debt to Studs Terkel.) I was careful to trace the details of each person’s identity in order to show how the privileged position with which whiteness operates is often contingent on other factors, including economic opportunity, education, religion, geography, sexuality, and gender.

I aligned each oral history not necessarily with the speaker’s favorite or most evocative song experience—they’d nearly all be “Terrible Lie” in that case—but with how the speaker’s words matched the sonic and textual world of a particular song. If you have a copy of
Pretty Hate Machine
, listen along to hear the book’s speakers with and against yours. The space between your hearing, their hearing, and my hearing is how we will get into a conversation (or argument) that is part of the point of this book. If the conversation makes us all cringe a bit, so much the better.

One fan named Gus, for instance, has a desire to return Cleveland to its rock past, one he thinks NIN epitomizes. This might influence his assertion that “Down in It” is
not
a hip-hop song, no matter how much the drum programming, bass lines, and highly rhythmic declamation of text would otherwise suggest. Another fan, Greg, hears “Sin” as a comment on the immorality of trust, a meaning that never would have occurred to me but which makes sense given the rest of his story. I always thought “Sin” was solved with the word
purity
, or with Trent strapped half-naked in a gyroscope spun by a dominatrix in the video: a song wrestling with Christian
guilt over desire. Maybe you heard it differently. Certainly Christ, suffering, pleasure, and guilt thread through both the album and these men’s histories—although the themes are more explicit in the lyrics than in the discussions with me, a near stranger. With every interview I was more aware that the way people listen and live in private is likely more vivid, wonderful, wrong, and terrible than they ever let on. This book is at least one step closer.