Re-discovering that "Hesitation Marks" is the one and only Nine Inch Nails album that Tidal doesn't have¹ and cracking up all over over again
"Oh, you didn't want *that* one"
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¹ I think the last time I looked into this it turned out to be a Canada geoIP thing.
Anyway this is my periodic reminder to you that if you used to be into NIN but fell off after "with teeth"/"year zero":
You really, *really* want to locate the "Not the Actual Events" / "Add Violence" / "Bad Witch" 2016-2018 EP trio, and just listen to all three in one go as if it's a 3-disc album (I have them set up as one playlist called "Not Violent Witch").
This run of music was *incredible*, career high, and it's deeply haunted by Reznor's personal friendships with Davids Lynch and Bowie
There's a track in the EP trio that exists solely because Reznor was trying to make a song David Lynch would like. Lynch asked if Reznor would appear in one of the musical segments in Twin Peaks The Return and Reznor was like sure how about we play this new song I'm working on? And Lynch was not ehh this isn't really the vibe… and so Reznor was like okay I have to make a song that is the vibe
"She's Gone Away" is literally designed to be a song that, if Nine Inch Nails existed in the universe of "Twin Peaks" but in the "Twin Peaks" universe Nine Inch Nails had never found mainstream popularity so in 2015 NIN was just touring with no budget playing small bars, "She's Gone Away" is the song Reznor would perform to the drinking crowd at the "Bang Bang Bar" outside the sleepy, haunted town of Twin Peaks, Washington with his wife playing the tambourine behind him. That's why it exists
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Okay so it's been explained to me that actually several large chunks of the NiN library are not available digitally at all currently due to Reznor's frequent label changes and some sort of presumably temporary snafu in inter-publisher negotiations, and shamefully Tidal does not currently even have "Not the Actual Events". Copyright does not succeed at the thing our society designed copyright to do
Non-jokingly, my advice to you: Do not become addicted to heroin and then sign contracts with a music industry label
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116025752963855521
Listening to Nine Inch Nails is so complicated to me. I would just loop his music for weeks at a time, for years, it was like the soundtrack of my own feelings, and then
and now I can't listen to the old stuff, the post 2015-stuff feels right to me but the old stuff is like, a dissonant note, the thing that was going "yeah, that's what life feels like" is going "this doesn't feel like me anymore", the feeling doesn't make sense to me anymore, but here's the thing:
Early (like, pre-2007) Nine Inch Nails is About Something. Here's what it's about: You're broken, you're irredeemable. There's something deep inside of you, something fundamental which corrupts, something broken in a way that will twist everything that happens and make it bad, make every victory sour, make you crush every opportunity and fumble every friendship. And it's not anything "wrong". It's just who you are, and it can't be fixed. That was what he was trying to say. That spoke to me. But:
There *was* something wrong with Trent Reznor. There was one, specific thing wrong with Trent Reznor, and there was one specific thing with me. This wasn't even The Human Condition or being depressed. It's just that Trent was addicted to heroin. Trent was addicted to heroin, and I had gender identity disorder. That was the One Thing. There was actually, really one corrupting thing preventing each of us from being able to be happy or succeed at anything.
And then, uh.
Those things got better.
@mcc hey I am exactly this person and I took your advice because I always value what you have to say about music, and I was rewarded as usual.
"The Idea of You" is the first track that really knocked me back on my heels. That rest in the lead guitar is SO. GOOD.
Thank you for the encouragement.