Seriously down in it
An old friend [tenure, not age] remembers Nine Inch Nails’ first album, released twenty years ago today:
1989. I got a real career type job. I got married. I got pregnant. It was like, yesterday I was working in a record store, going to dingy night clubs to listen to some local punk rock band sing about the unfairness of it all, and today I’m rethinking my choice of dropping my career to be a housewife, my days spent watching some women on a daytime talk show talk about the unfairness of life. What happened?
Enter Trent Reznor and Pretty Hate Machine. This is the album that tied me to those days I left behind. It’s the album that made me yearn for those complex emotions of figuring out love and life. I’d listen to it and almost wish I was back in those night clubs, back in a time when making out in the back seat of a car was ok, back when I wrote poetry about love and loss, back when there was an inherent passion in everything, even heartbreak. Pretty Hate Machine was dark and sexy, bitter and furious. And it was a reminder of how quickly I went from embodying all that to embodying the very model of suburban housewife. I wanted it all. I wanted to feel like Trent Reznor, but live like Martha Stewart. Something I could never have, indeed.
I came late to NIN — I was aware of Reznor’s existence, though I was still grooving on insipid Eighties pop and paid him no heed — but I know from bitter and furious, so it was perhaps inevitable that I’d turn in his general direction, the Captain and Tennille record playing in the background at the moment I type this notwithstanding.
smitty »
20 October 2009 · 9:01 pm
The sad thing with Reznor is that he’s basically been releasing PHM every couple of years since.
CGHill »
20 October 2009 · 9:13 pm
He’s a bit more melodic these days, and maybe a tad less irked, but he doesn’t venture too far afield.
CT »
20 October 2009 · 9:54 pm
Speaking of Reznor, he’s uncharacteristically sentimental over the anniversary:
http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/5034809185
CGHill »
20 October 2009 · 10:07 pm
His first tweet in three months, yet.
fillyjonk »
21 October 2009 · 3:14 pm
1989? It seems to me they’ve been around for longer than that. I could have sworn there were kids in high school with me who listened to them.
Surely we weren’t ALL new-wave weirdos in the mid-80s?