Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (5 page)

Reznor began and thrives as a lone musician/engineer, and has come to rank among studio-rat superstars such as Prince, Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and Brian Eno. As such, he embodies the shift from the twentieth-century commercial recording industry’s complex labor pool of songwriters, musicians, recording engineers, producers, and mixing professionals to the twenty-first-century home-studio composer/musician/engineer, which allowed him to claim, with some truth, in
Pretty Hate Machine
’s liner notes, that “Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor.”

The recording studio was moving from a place that hosted a cacophony of bodies to one full of interconnected, autonomously operating gear, and Reznor came to Right Track at a time when it was almost possible to replace all musicians with machines. With the adoption of MIDI—a digital language that allows components made by different manufacturers to talk to one another—musicians in the 1980s could use a single instrument to control entire orchestras. While digital effects processors and instruments dominated studio production in the 1980s, it was not until the 1990s that home-computer microprocessors could handle the complexity of audio recording. Reznor was one of home audio recording’s first “digital natives,” and has recorded each one of his albums with the aid of a computer. As personal computers became faster and more affordable, a new generation of software was developed to track, sequence, and mix sound. Trent became an early adopter of these
digital sound technologies, even teaching his co-producers how to get the most out of new computers, outboard gear, and software.

Today GarageBand comes preloaded on every Mac, and any amateur musician who owns a decent microphone and laptop can create recordings anywhere in the world with a higher quality than professionals could manage in expensive studios 70 years ago. And the musician can do it all alone. As a consequence, major studios with great live rooms, huge and costly analog equipment, and trained, professional sound engineers have shut down all over the world in the past 15 years. In their stead a new class of creative worker has arisen, one that can run an entire studio alone and make quality recordings virtually unaided. Some even record their own material, cutting the division of labor down to zero. These are the new, flexible, specialized, and independent musical laborers of the twenty-first century, and Reznor is a pioneer among them.

Three of the demos Trent recorded in his Right Track off-hours between 1987 and 1988, which were mixed by one of the studio’s engineers, Sean Beavan, were sent out by manager John Malm Jr. to small indie labels. All the labels showed interest, and Reznor went with TVT. Label head Steve Gottlieb asked for nothing more than polished versions of the demos. Perhaps he heard Nine Inch Nails as a dark synth-pop band, something along the lines of the then mega-successful Depeche Mode. He must have been overjoyed when Reznor said he wanted to finish the recordings with the very U.K. producers who were making synth-pop profitable in the late 1980s. But once Reznor began working on the record, he realized that his strong vision for the tracks clashed with the professionals’ already codified ideas. This led him to denigrate his work with British dark-wave
producer John Fryer in Boston; to chase the producer Flood, whom Trent respected for his methodical programming skills, from the U.S. to the U.K.; and to describe Adrian Sherwood’s work on “Down in It” as too “predictable,”
²⁷
even though he admired it.

Reznor’s goal, especially after NIN’s first, notoriously uneven tour opening for Skinny Puppy in 1988, was to foreground the expression of raw emotion, be it through vocals or guitars. Beavan understood this best, acknowledging that the balance of industrial texture with big, upfront vocals like those of Annie Lennox was Trent’s goal, and produced parts of
Pretty Hate Machine
(and later
The Downward Spiral
) in this way. Trent saw the pop vocals as something to upset the industrial tradition from which he had drawn inspiration but never planned to be part of.

According to Reznor, Gottlieb called the tracks of
PHM
“a complete abortion.”
²⁸
The term was used frequently as the opposite of a “runaway hit” in commercial radio programming parlance. Reznor had indeed aborted the commercial aspect of the demos, replacing it with a lean, sparse industrial sound, with shades of hip-hop and white funk. It was something Gottlieb didn’t want, but Reznor was going to keep it.

It is impossible to know if
PHM
would have succeeded as it did had it sounded more like its demos, but it is unlikely that the single “Down in It” would have fared well without the sub-bass of Adrian Sherwood. “Head Like a Hole,” a response to Gottlieb’s meddling with Reznor’s work, wouldn’t have been made at all. The most obvious difference between
Purest Feeling
and
PHM
is the drums, some of which were played live on
Purest Feeling
. The
PF
beats were either awkward, poorly miked, straightforward rock in 4/4 or extremely simple new-wave/industrial-hybrid electronic patterns (especially the italo bass of non-album track “Maybe
Just Once”). “Down in It” on
Purest Feeling
was a rough blend of Eric B. homage and Thrill Kill-style sampled industrial atmospheres, with unabashed rapping by Trent. Only the keyboard and guitar hooks of the chorus are familiar. The song was reworked for the album by Sherwood so that the drums hit deeper, the vocals relaxed a bit, and the synths lingered more ominously upfront. And in “Down in It,” as everywhere on
PHM
and NIN’s subsequent recordings, the bass works as both rhythm and melody, another synth with a shorter attack, stronger hook, and more obvious presence.

The vocals on
Purest Feeling
are strikingly similar to those of
PHM
, showing that Reznor’s single biggest traditional musical gift is the ability to sing idiosyncratic pop melodies full of emotion. From the beginning, it was obvious that he intended to use his voice as his primary musical expression, and he avoided processing that would rob his vocals of gesture, keeping them high in the mix. On
Purest Feeling
, Reznor’s anguished legato lacks control, and he often resorts to lounge vibrato to mask his anxiety over singing lead-vocal parts, an insecurity that never really left him. He mostly let go of the overperformance, although some Vegas schlock can still be heard in the opening of “The Only Time.” Reznor’s reedy tenor doesn’t have a large range—you can hear him croak like Skinny Puppy’s Kevin Ogilvie as he struggles for a low note on the demo of “Terrible Lie”—but he finds his real strength in a large range of breaths, whispers, and screams, often coupling these with vocal and instrumental effects that merge voice and machine on the scream-to-synth solo of “The Only Time.” On the demo, he doesn’t have the control to deliver those whispers as well as he can his anger, and his quiet confessions come out underwhelming in a flat, nasal western Pennsylvania sotto voce.

With
PHM
, Trent learned how to get intimate with the
mic. One of many such moments comes after the first chorus of “The Only Time,” when he repeats, “This is the only time I really feel alive” and releases a long exhale. It cracks mid-breath like a lover’s sigh in what could be the most erotic moment on the album, a sonic match to Trent’s seduction of the mic in the “Closer” video.

Breath is an index of the body doing its work, and Trent learned early that it can be used to great effect against the coldness of a song’s synthetic space. Audible inhales frame the pseudo-rapped verses of “Down in It.” They show up on the first verse of “That’s What I Get” or extensively throughout the verses on “Sin,” where Trent draws out the last word of each line with rhythmic vitriol until it resembles another syllable. The technique returns on much-maligned parts of the
PHM
-redux
With Teeth
. While generally phrasing behind the beat like a torch singer, Reznor lands ahead of the beat when the lyrics demand an agitated state: “I am JUST-ifed, I am PURE-ified.” His voice shifts registers and slipping ahead of the circular bass line.

Much has been made of Reznor’s merger of synths and guitars, but it is important to note that when
Pretty Hate Machine
came out Reznor was seen as a sellout to American industrial in part because he didn’t use enough hard guitar. A comparison with Ministry’s
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
, which came out only one month after
PHM
, would suffice to prove this.
Broken
, Nails’ 1992 follow-up EP, would address this critique and pay homage to Ministry with a furious onslaught of guitar. The
PHM
demos have more guitar than does the final mix, which pushes up the pads and plays down live sounds while losing the horror samples altogether. Guitars in the album have an unusual distortion created by plugging direct, tracking to a Mac Plus, and exporting the files to an inexpensive early computer sound synthesis
program called TurboSynth. With TurboSynth, Reznor manipulated the sample to produce a truly strange, fearsome tone unlike a traditional rock guitar sound.

Non-demo track “Head Like A Hole,” often thought of as having heavy guitars, has only four distorted notes of guitar in the chorus. Most of the song’s feral energy comes from a dominating Prophet-5 bass line, the relentlessly upfront vocal, the dense drum programming, and a multitude of backup layers that mimic chant. There are no more than four pitches of guitar on any one song of
PHM
and the guitar is used only for choruses and in middle eights. Reznor has said that “Terrible Lie” was his audition song for guitarists because it’s only two notes, but he wanted fingers to bleed for them. Where the synth offers melody and control, the guitar in NIN is a machine for displays of affect: it is a fury of attack and chaos of distortion.

The gothy shimmer played by early NIN member Richard Patrick for “Sanctified” is the only non-distorted guitar on the album, although the demo of “Kinda I Want To” has a New Order-like acoustic guitar buried in its chorus, which was replaced by a snare fill on the album. Closing track “Ringfinger” features perhaps the most typical use of guitar. Appearing after two iterations of the chorus, a short distorted solo leads into the Jane’s Addiction “Had A Dad” sample and the final synth-bass outro, where turntables, guitars, drum machines, and samples battle then fade into an electric sizzle, as if Trent’s studio had short-circuited in the aftermath of such a rock cliché.

A listen to
Purest Feeling
makes it obvious that Reznor had rejected the experimental structures of dance and industrial music from the outset in favor of the verse-chorus familiarity that allowed Nails’ singles to cross between dance and pop formats. The album’s sequencing, complete with song
cross-fades, stitched together the disparate tracks into a story of faint hope after betrayal, making it possible to hear
PHM
as a Romantic-style industrial pop concept record, one that could tie into the prog-rock aesthetic from which Trent had come.

Still,
PHM
wasn’t meant to be heard as a rock album. In the context of early 1990s guitar bands with which Nine Inch Nails shared airplay, it became part of the alternative rock music of the 1990s. But if you think of Pretty Hate Machine as it existed in 1989, it is possible to hear the album as a becoming, as the next step of a process of 1980s new wave, dub, hip-hop, and industrial experimentation, the product of a decade of rupture in and from rock, a work that could have been one of the next mainstreamed successes in an alternate history of American pop music, one where grunge never happened.
²⁹

Pretty Hate Machine
arrived relatively unannounced in stores on October 20, 1989, but the earliest listeners heard only the singles, which played heavily in video bars and the alternative dance-music scene. First came the 12-inch “Down in It,” then the single “Head Like a Hole,” while the album slowly made its way into the underground. Though its origins were in the dance-music community, the album was subsequently heard and adopted by metal, industrial, rock, punk, underground, and college-rock enthusiasts who were later blended together to form the category “alternative” in the wake of Nails’ seventh U.S. tour (in two and a half years) as part of the inaugural Lollapalooza Festival. Each group picked up on different aspects of this seemingly sparse album as indicative of its belonging to—or exclusion from—their listening worlds. It began to weave itself into the lives of its listeners through these associations, becoming a dance record, a breakup record, an angry record, a desperate
late-night record, a hopeful record, an energetic record, or a romantic record to different listeners or to the same listeners at different periods in their lives.

Trent has a favorite story about the impact of the album.
³⁰
After the release, he sent a tape of it to his uncle at the Reznor Heating Corp. His uncle gave the tape to a prospective secretary to listen to while he finished a meeting. When he returned to the waiting room, she was gone. He called her to ask why she left, and she said the tape made her realize that she didn’t want to work for the company.

“That’s pretty much what I was setting out to do,” said Trent.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Pink Floyd, “Time”

Mercer County forms a line between western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. It’s a square turned quote by a sharp protuberance at the county’s southeastern edge. It seems to be voicing what Butler County has to say about its Pittsburgh-bearing southern neighbor Allegheny. One-third from its bottom and nearly half from either side sits the borough of Mercer.

In the late seventeenth century, William Penn traveled to Switzerland and Germany, posting notices that invited skilled workers to his new colonial land grant. Penn had a soft spot for oppressed Central Europeans, and many Protestants from the Palatinate (modern southwestern Germany) took up his call. After Penn’s woods became part of the new United States of America, the government offered revolutionary
war veterans land in parcels of 200 to 2,000 acres in western Pennsylvania. Some 3,000 soldiers began settling there in the late 1700s. In 1800, 200 acres were donated to make a county seat in Mercer, and the town’s first permanent structure, a Presbyterian church, was built. A stagecoach route between Pittsburgh in the south and Erie in the north turned Mercer into a hotel town and traveler’s way station in the nineteenth century. Since that time, Mercer’s population has always hovered at about 2,000. Ninety-six percent of the area’s population is Caucasian, a statistic that has not changed more than a few percentage points in 100 years.