Chapter Two: Nine Inch Nails Remixed
By Brett Beach
March 17, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This is the sound of your song being fucked up beyond repair.
(My visceral immediate reaction to any number of tracks on the various Nine Inch Nails remix albums that have been released over the last twenty years.)
That is just fucking strange.
(My joyful response to seeing Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, snazzily attired, picking up Golden Globes and Oscars for their score to The Social Network. Also, my reaction to Reznor’s newfound fatherhood last fall, and my firmly held certainty that unlike fellow new dad Elton John, Reznor is helping to change his fair share of poopy diapers.)
This week, I step well outside my comfort zone in the world of film and into that of music, to consider the idea of the remix album as a sequel in its own right. I will do so by examining an artist that has created companion pieces to most of its studio recordings, projects that are at least as engaging, focused, and creative as the albums proper, and in one instance, better than all of those.
I was 13 and had just started high school when Pretty Hate Machine was released in October 1989. As with most of my music purchases in the years of 1988-1991, interest was piqued by the band name, the album title, and a brief introductory profile in Rolling Stone from that summer. (Taken together, those somehow constituted “word-of-mouth” and “buzz” for me at that time.) The chief anecdote I recall from the short RS piece is that Reznor gave a cassette demo of the album to a visitor at his uncle’s place of business (where he was working at the time) and the hapless woman went fleeing from the waiting area upon hearing it. I still don’t know how much truth there is in that account, but it hints at a sense of humor on Reznor’s part that often gets overlooked when discussing the band (not that NIN makes it easy to find that humor sometimes).
I have listened to NIN continuously for over 20 years and yet I don’t immediately think to name them when asked for my favorite bands. (I am not entirely ready to consider them in the past tense, for as far as I am concerned there are no farewell tours in the music industry, not even after death.) When I finally saw the band for the first time in 2008 in Portland (on the Lights In the Sky over North America tour) I was floored by the band’s energy and drive, swept up in the swelling emotions of the crowd, and impressed with the stage and light design, even more so knowing that the cost of the tour was self-financed, with no label footing the bill. But what I must acknowledge is that NIN’s latter-day music — and that of Reznor as the figurehead of the band and in his solo endeavors — means more to me now at 35 than Pretty Hate Machine did at 13 or The Downward Spiral at 18.
I consider his decision to finally do proper film scores (after his sequenced soundtracks and original contributions to Natural Born Killers and Lost Highway) to be both completely organic and logical and, as others would agree, about damn time! From his and Ross’s opening composition “Hand Covers Bruise,” he crafts an unexpected but perfectly complementary accompaniment to Fincher’s and Sorkin’s portrait of the rise of the idea of a global community and the young man at the center of it all. As an Entertainment Weekly writer astutely noted, “[The] score is filled with a sense of regret for the things its characters are not even aware they are about to lose.” Knowing that Reznor and Fincher are collaborating again on the Rooney Mara version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is enough to pave over any qualms I might have about that being an unnecessary American remake.
I think the reason I like the above quote so much, aside from its insight, is that is speaks to a larger degree of openness and expansiveness that was missing in NIN’s early years. I’ll be talking more about the music than the lyrics as far as the remix albums go — and there’s an obvious reason for that — but part of the reason I drifted from NIN in the late ‘90s and early last decade is that I felt NIN’s universe, in toto, seemed to consist of a geography about the space and size of a broom closet. The closet had been well explored and no doubt interesting things still remained to be uncovered, but would they ever open up the door? To extend the metaphor across to a wholly different band, I adore The Hold Steady in part because I feel they are always striving to open up new rooms in an abode that must be up to five levels and Lord knows how many rooms at this point. And with Craig Finn’s carefully etched anecdotes circling back around to characters we have met before, we are never quite sure whom we might encounter at any given moment.
But my view on NIN began to change around the middle of last decade, driven in part by two unrelated incidents. I briefly dated a younger woman (for perspective, if she had been into Pretty Hate Machine upon its release, she would have been the hippest kindergartner in her class) who was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails, although she, like me, had not heard a lot of the single-only remixes and hadn’t listened to all of the remix albums available up to that point (late 2004). So she purchased and I checked out from the library and between us, I began to see bits and pieces of a larger picture. The relationship was over by Thanksgiving — valedictorily ushered in with an awkward and uncomfortable viewing of the Kinnear-Romijn-DeNiro thriller Godsend — but I would always have the music.
The second was the spring release of With Teeth in 2005 and being able to stream the album numerous times in the weeks before it hit stores. The first single “The Hand That Feeds” was a good early introduction and the snarling topical lyrics and classic NIN driving beat were a potent kick in the head to get me out of bed when it would pop up on my radio alarm clock several weeks in a row.
But my favorites from the album are the opener and closer, “All The Love in the World” and “Right Where It Belongs," the former for the way Reznor drops the expected end to the line “Sometimes I get so lonely I could...” and for the unexpected appearance of piano and then drums at the three-quarters mark to replace the skittering beat of the early portion with a rave-up feel. As for the latter song, I choose it for its sonic texture and music-box feel and that unnerving “noise” (audience screeching at a concert, animals howling, insects buzzing?) Taken together, those tracks showed me a new life in the band and paved the way for 2007’s Year Zero, which I think is the band’s best studio album.
There is a lot more I would like to say about NIN, aside from the topic at hand, but now it is time for the topic to be at hand.
Fixed (Halo 6/ December 1992)
Track under discussion: Screaming Slave.
I bought Broken (still, I would argue, one of the harshest, most dissonant albums ever to crack the Billboard Top 10) when it came out in late September ‘92 (around the same time as slightly more pleasant albums from REM, Peter Gabriel, and 10,000 Maniacs) and I don’t think I actually made it through a first listen at the time. It fucking scared me. (This irrational fear was also why I did not attend the NIN/Bowie tour in 1995.) I was not aware of the existence of Fixed until I saw it on my dorm mate’s CD rack my freshman year of college. I vaguely recall sneaking covert listens of it when he would go away for the weekend, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that I actually gave it a proper front to back listen. If Broken is the sound of NIN pushing a song as far as it will go and still hold on to a beat — and I am big believer that NIN does find a way to keep that hook alive at all costs — then Fixed is the result of that beat/hook being clamped down on the work table and torn into with a drill.
I would love for “Screaming Slave” to be the demo track at home audio stores nationwide. On the one hand, it may be the harshest remix NIN has recorded to date — eight minutes in total, it’s a veritable symphony of cacophony building in intensity and tone for the first two minutes before a recognizable beat from its source “Happiness in Slavery” can be even found, and ending on 90 seconds of effects after a brief 30 second interlude of relative quiet (albeit pulled from a NIN promo video where a man is being tortured.) But it also employs what proves to be a recurring technique among NIN remixes, burying the song’s lyrics underneath layers of noise or focusing in on a particular set of lines or verse and leaving the chorus out in the cold.
Speaking to my earlier mention of humor, the Broken/Fixed dichotomy is simplistic but it never fails to elicit a chuckle from me (as does the potential double meaning of the title, “fixed” as in a neutered animal). I also like the deceptively calm blue of the color contrasted with Broken’s hellfire orange and Fixed’s simple mission statement in the inside liner: “featuring various interpretations of songs that appear in their proper form on the Broken EP”. Fixed is the only one of NIN’s remix albums that did not chart on the Billboard Top 200.
Further Down The Spiral (Halo 10/ June 1995)
Tracks under discussion: At the Heart of It All, The Beauty of Being Numb.
What appeals to me about this and Things Falling Apart is how both feel complete as albums “despite” consisting simply of reworkings of existing material (with a few new tracks mixed in). In this case, the remix lasts nearly as long as the album from which it is spawned. Something else noteworthy is that since the album’s singles (i.e. the well-known tracks) are often released accompanied with remixes, it’s not always the best known or best-liked tracks that show up on the NIN remix albums. Further Down the Spiral is a case in point. There is a slightly different take on “Hurt” but no “March of the Pigs” or “Closer”. Multi-part takes on Mr. Self Destruct, and several versions of Piggy and Eraser comprise the lion’s share of the running time. The tracks that attract me are the ones that explore a legitimate tension in the material by allowing in an “outsider”: Aphex Twin’s wholly original contribution “At the Heart of It All” and secondary contribution to the track “The Beauty of Being Numb.”
At around the same time that Further Down the Spiral came out, Aphex Twin had released the single “Ventolin.” I saw the EP for the song (with six different “remixes” of the song, many having nothing to do with the single version) available used for $1 on CD and bought it apropos of nothing, because, well, if I hated it, it was only a dollar lost. When I first heard “At the Heart of It All” I immediately placed it as being by the same artist, simply by virtue of how much it sounded like the various takes on “Ventolin.” The seven-minute instrumental alternates bell-like percussion with radiator steam beats in the foreground and an ominous orchestral refrain in the background. Coming at just the halfway point in the album, it provides an unexpected transition to the closing tracks.
“Numb” is part NIN (first half), part Twin (second half) and the “robots making lounge music” vibe of that second part as it fades out into the “straw-sucking” effect that is used at the opening of “Eraser”, is what helps me persist in labeling this NIN’s “easy listening experiment.” As gloomy as befits an album that is branched out from The Downward Spiral, I consider this more a Gothic work, and despite what the title indicates, the music tends to swell as much as it does crash and break. A distorted sample of Reznor’s never-cresting scream (which I now think of as an aural equivalent to Edvard Munch’s infamous painting) used throughout and particularly on the closing track “Erased. Over. Out” is both bone chilling and yet oddly hilarious. Once again, there is that humor poking through.
Things Falling Apart (Halo 16/ November 2000)
Tracks under discussion: Where is Everybody? (Version), Metal, 10 Miles High, Starfuckers, Inc. (Version)
Perhaps it shouldn’t still surprise me to learn that my opinion always seems to run contrary to popular and critical taste at the oddest times. When I finally decided to read up on this album, my favorite of all of NIN’s releases, I was floored to uncover that it is held in the lowest regard not simply in the band’s catalog, but for the label Nothing Records as well. I will grant that a remix album that attempts to condense the 23 song sprawl of The Fragile into 50 mins and does so with not one, not two, but three passes at Starfuckers, Inc (my vote for weakest NIN single ever), a B-side and a Gary Numan cover has the deck stacked pretty high against it - which makes its success that much more confounding and exhilarating.
Cut and pasted though it may be, it has a vitality and rush that carries it from one end of the running time to the other. The sequencing of the last four tracks alone exemplifies this. “Where is Everybody?” (remixed by Danny Lohner and Telefon Tel Aviv) is conventional by NIN standards but in replacing the mid-tempo beat of the album original with a more propulsive kick, jamming the verses closer together, and shaving about three-fourths of the time off the bridge, it becomes a song reborn. And at the 3:18 mark, a delicious microsecond pause before the song explodes into its closing minutes. This is one of my favorite remixes of any song.
“Metal” is a double-sided tribute to Gary Numan via two tracks from his landmark 1980 album The Pleasure Principle: the first half is a faithful rendition of the title song, the second half is an instrumental interpolation of the close-out melody from “M.E.”, now best known as the tune sampled by Basement Jaxx for “Where’s Your Head At.” Taking what would have been a three-minute tune and turning it into the longest track on Things Falling Apart is another example of certain failure somehow redeemed. The cross pollination of songs feels natural and the slower tempo segues well into “10 Miles High”, a B-side designed to feel submerged and murky but cluster bomb with force at unexpected moments.
The closing take on “Starfuckers, Inc.” by Charlie Clouser redeems the song primarily by stripping away everything but the title (but so distorted that it might actually escape without notice on the public airwaves) and a single two-line couplet snuck in during the closing moments. The opening two and half minute drums and bass buildup is so throbbing and unrelenting I used to blast this while snarled in rush-hour traffic with the windows closed just to observe the entire being of the car shaking. The final abrupt “breakdown” and end to the album is simply the sonic icing on the whole unruly cake.
Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (Halo 25/ November 2007)
Tracks under discussion: Gunshots by Computer, My Violent Heart, Me I’m Not.
As much as I admire Year Zero for its concept and love it for its music and the way NIN seems to throw open the doors to a larger universe lyrically, therein lies the problem for the remixes to compete. More traditional in its structure (nearly all 16 songs from Year Zero get a pass through, in roughly their original order) and in its use of big name artists involved with the remixings (members of New Order, Interpol, The Faint, Ladytron, even The Kronos Quartet all get in on the action), it winds up merely solid instead of truly impressive. Spoken word “slam” artist Saul Williams (who toured with NIN around this time) kicks off the proceedings in pile driver mode with a brief radicalized take on Year Zero’s opener “Hyperpower!” Pirate Robot Midget cuts the running time of “My Violent Heart” nearly in half but maintains the revolutionary push and lock step beat of the original. The album’s centerpiece — at a truly epic 14 minutes, it takes up one-fifth of the album and is the longest cut on any NIN-affiliated project that I am aware of — is a mostly instrumental, largely overhauled, sparsely arranged re-envisioning of “Me, I’m Not” by Olof Dreijer that strongly evokes the post-apocalyptic jitteriness of its Year Zero counterpart, but simply over wears its welcome by half. This is one instance where I was sorely disappointed that the lyrics were lost in the new imagining of the song.
And as I wrap up typing in the wee hours of the morning, from one father to another, I am left wondering if Trent Reznor plays the Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions of Nine Inch Nails for his child. Or if he simply sidles the both of them up to a piano and simply makes it up as he goes along.
Next time: An independent film that defines the 1990s (in my eyes) received the oddest of sequels nearly 10 years later. I give that Chapter Two a second glance and see if I can find a way inside this time.