Friday, 21 February 2014
The Art of Things Falling Apart
Nine
Inch Nails has always been
concerned with things falling apart: destruction, self-destruction,
corruption, decay, downward spirals, dystopia, cracks, glitches,
broken machines, broken people. Alternately confrontational and
self-loathing, external and internalised, it's a list of dark
negatives that pervades the music, the lyrics, the album and concept
art, the live performances, the music videos, and quite possibly Mr
Trent Reznor himself.
It's
been said (and I'd source this if I could remember where) that what
differentiated NIN from other bands that got stuck with the label
'industrial' was that Reznor made it personal. He turned it all
inward, making it emotional and introspective. Even at his most
confrontational, his songs are nearly always about a state of
mind—not necessarily always his, sometimes constructing a persona
to explore a certain psychology, as in 'Closer' or 'Capital G'. But
they always have a subjective bent, and all that 'industrial' stuff
gets internalised... all the strange, tense, unnatural and
uncomfortable noises used to explore and represent these usually
deteriorating mindsets. They're subjectivities of brokenness,
often mirroring broken systems imposed from the outside.
The
way Reznor creates and layers these sounds gives NIN an emotional
range that goes far beyond the words he sings. If you listen to the
lyrics of the latest album, Hesitation Marks, they all tread
and retread the same very simple ground—the 'I' of Reznor
battling/embracing the 'you' of what might be NIN, those dark depths
of his soul, his past self, the needy throngs of NIN fans who want to
pull him back in, etc, etc—while the music itself takes us on a complex, more various journey that explores and rounds out all of the
related emotions with a subtlety the words could never touch.
I'm not personally that attentive when it comes to lyrics. It's not
that I don't hear them, or pick up on them, or consider them an
important part of the song, but in music what matters much more to me
is the general emotional thrust of the whole track, how it
aesthetically impacts or insinuates, which incorporates but doesn't
ride wholly on the lyrics. I like to bury myself in the whole sound.
And while Reznor's lyrics do often provide NIN's most immediate and
significant emotional content, and it's personal and raw, it's just one
important layer of many in technically complex productions.
The lyrics, though, while probably the most easily criticised aspect of NIN
for their sometimes cringingly angsty nature, have their moments too.
Some of NIN's most satisfying moments are when they cut a little
deeper and present the darker realities behind the triter angst. In
'The Perfect Drug', for example, a straightforward, even soppy line,
'Without you, everything falls apart', repeated throughout the track,
is followed up at the end with, 'Without you, it's not as much fun to
pick up the pieces', a more complex, broken idea of intimacy.
Year Zero's
'Capital G' takes on the persona of a power-hungry, egotistical
megalomaniac, which, like the rest of the dystopia-themed album, is
not a hugely original take on the political realities it portrays,
but it's a persona that's not unfamiliar territory to NIN. Rather
than simply condemning it, Reznor does what Reznor does best—he
occupies that mindset, makes it emotionally real, and evokes the
seductive nature of power with the lines, 'Don't try to tell
me that some power can corrupt a person/You haven't had enough to
know what it's like.'
And
in 'Everything', the alarmingly upbeat song from the latest album,
the unicorn-from-the-ashes pop punk refrain of 'Wave goodbye/Wish me
well/I've become something else' gets the muttered-under-the-breath,
parenthetical 'Just as well' as the guitars swarm back in. NIN
explores broad tones laced with dark ironies—cracks and fissures
that often give way to deeper darknesses.
It's
this self-awareness that elevates NIN. For every plaintive or
petulant wail, somewhere there's the sardonic undertone—the eyes
that watch the destruction happen with intelligent detachment,
understanding the conceptual and psychological complexity of some of
these emotions and what's driving them; and the part that kind of
likes it there in the darkness, and wants to explore that too.
NIN is fascinated by all these
destructive emotions and impulses. It understands how they're
seductive. Which isn't to say that these emotions aren't really felt
or they're all supposed to be ironic—the emotions always lead. But
this sardonic sneer always makes itself felt when Reznor wants you to
sense how fucked up things are—like he does in 'Capital G' or in
'Closer'. And blurring the lines between himself and some of these
negative personas seems to be part of the project, too.
Conceptually,
every NIN album positions itself somewhere along the axis of tension
between self and destruction—from the self-annihilation of The
Downward Spiral, to the
explosive Broken
EP
which stabs you with its angry retaliatory shards, to the dystopia of
Year Zero,
which frames it in the context of the state and political power. And
then there's Hesitation Marks,
a dark, tentative, uncertain simmering behind a calm exterior,
playing cautiously with positive emotions.
For me, though, the
quintessential NIN album remains the most decadent one:
The
Fragile (1999)—a double-album that balances complexity and raw
emotion, internal exploration and outward expression, and represents
this tension in its most overt, naked state. Following on from the
systematic self-destruction of
The Downward Spiral, which
concerned itself with the methodical rejection of all sources of meaning, this
album starts at that point of nihilism and, in Reznor's own words,
'
attempts to create order from chaos, but never reaches the goal.'
Like
all NIN albums, The
Fragile is
characterised by explorations of negative feelings, but it's more
introspective than confrontational. The swells of anger, rage,
anxiety, and all that other fun stuff are treated with more subtlety and variety than previous efforts, temporarily offering softer, calmer
reprieves. The expression of these emotions is simultaneously
destructive and empowering, a kind of existential resistance to
oblivion wrought by desperation: the album offers
catharsis,
but with the distinct feeling that there's something broken about this
catharsis, something fragile and imperfect. It's an edifice crumbling
even as it's being erected, feeding off an energy and madness that
seeps through the cracks.
The
experience is defined by instability. Every emotion is a struggle
through a thousand distorted sounds. The instrumentation of The
Fragile,
predominantly piano, guitar and other string instruments, gives it an
organic, baroque richness unlike anything else in NIN's
catalogue; but these instruments, already imperfect, are all placed under
that defining tension. There's an off-kilterness to every wail, every
sneer, every tentative ukelele interlude or somehow ironic
pseudo-military crunch. It's often heavy and sometimes oppressive,
but Reznor never loses sight (or sound) of how the music works,
even while exploring all the little ways he can make it very subtly
not work.
I
always liked
The Fragile, and NIN generally, for what seemed
to me like its non-specificity: while being very personal, it dealt
with abstract, general emotions, universal feelings, and you could
make it the soundtrack of anything where its tense energy
would fit. It wasn't specific in a way that I'd find alienating; it
didn't place these feelings in a specific neighbourhood in a life that wasn't mine. Rock critic Robert Christgau
described NIN's later instrumental
Ghosts I-IV as '
mental wallpaper', and while that's kind of derogatory and is definitely
more suited to the thinner ambience of
Ghosts than the heavier
substance of
The Fragile, in principle it's more or less the
same idea: it's the sort of music you can make your own, plaster your
walls with and inhabit as your mood or disposition deems fit.
Of
course, what seems like non-specificity to me might still be
alienating to other people, and obviously not everyone is going to be
interested in a double album full of angry, conflicted manfeels. It
also, culturally, gravitates to
wherever these emotions can be the least bit validated or exploited,
from hormonal teens, to clueless macho types who pick up on the
aggression but not the self-loathing, to the movie people who want to
sell dreck like 300
and use it in their trailers because it's dark, edgy and exciting.
But for those who listen, an album like The
Fragile offers
a complicated release: catharsis through human imperfection, and the exhilarating freedom of structural instability, forming precarious spires and seas that last only as long as the emotions they're built from.
Labels: music, nine inch nails, rage against the machine, rock a little, tensions
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