60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Closer”—Nine Inch Nails

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Rob reminisces about the first time he heard “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, the state of industrial rock during that time, and his deep love for Trent Reznor. Host: Rob Harvilla Guests: William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes from .clipping Producers: Justin Sayles and Devon Renaldo Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Additional Production: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Charles Holmes, the Ringer Music Show. And I'm Cole Kushner from Dysect, and Charles and I are teaming up to create Last Song Standing, a new show where we determined an artist's single best song by debating our way through their entire catalog. And for our first season, we're covering Kendrick Lamar. We're talking good kid to Pimple Butterfly, Dan, Mr. Morow, the mixtapes, the Lusies, and the features. Listen to Last Song Standing on the Dysect podcast feed only on Spotify.

I am holding a sausage and egg McMuffin from McDonald's with cheese, either eating it or just holding it. I remember its warmth in my hand, in my fist, mid-90s, mid-high school. I will estimate the time at 7.15 a.m. I'm riding shotgun and a Saturn driven by my dear friend Todd. That's not his real name, but Todd for sure drove a Saturn, a used, rusty, ramshackle, slate gray Saturn, roughly the color of the dismal monochrome northeast Ohio morning sky. I almost remember more about Todd's Saturn than I do about Todd himself at this point. Sitting here now, I can still feel the Saturn's engine hacking and coughing and belching beneath me as Todd drove. I can hear the engine going, this worrisome ascending chug as Todd accelerated around turn.

like he had driven a go-kart off the lot of a miniature golf course, and the go-kart had swelled somehow to regular car size. In ascending order of intensity, I remember Todd. I remember Todd's Saturn. I remember the binder of CDs in Todd's Saturn. We didn't drink at all. Todd loved Tool. Todd and I listened to the Tool song Sober in Todd's Saturn

roughly 400 times per summer. in high school. As we listen to Sober, I would thumb through the CD booklet to the tool album undertow. Todd had all the CD booklets neatly slipped in behind the CDs in the binder. The undertow liner notes are super grody. You got the pig with all the forks. You got the naked guy and the naked lady. You got the x-ray of the vibrator. Just a rich cornucopia of profound sophomoric imagery to contemplate as Todd drove us to Denny's. Todd loved stabbing westward. This is pushing later into high school into the second wave of various morose and cuddly,

mainstream industrial rock bands, grousing about various indifferent sexy ladies. What do I have to do by stabbing westward as the apex of the form? But you got gravity kills. You got God lives underwater. You got filter. You got dink. D-I-N-K, if you lived in northeast Ohio. You got options.

Todd and I sat in Todd Saturn listening to all this stuff and stewing separately, silently over our own personal, local, indifference sexy ladies. Often, I suspect, we were stewing over the same ladies. Occasionally, some of these ladies consented to ride in the backseat of Todd Saturn as he drove us all to Eaton Park. When there were chicks in the car, we played either Bush or Candlebox. Have I ever laid on you my theory that the guitar solo and far behind by Candlebox is the perfect synthesis of male and female, as I personally defined the abstract terms male and female as a teenager, aggression and vulnerability. I forget which of those is male and which is female. Actually, I feel like I've mentioned this already. I'm sorry if I have.

Frankly, I'm sorry even if I'm mentioning this for the first time. But it's the fucking truth. Me riding shotgun in Todd Saturn with chicks in the backseat as we drive to the shoddy diner attached to the truck stop, 20 miles out of town, listening to the far behind guitar solo when I'm sitting there thinking, one day I will know love this pure. And then late at night, 1130 at night, Tom, so we got curfews. Perhaps after we dropped the chicks off and Todd and I were once again alone with each other and with our thoughts and feeling our darkest, our bluest, our most conflicted, our rowdiest, our most deviant, lords of acid.

I think of our pure sex. Deep sex. Rough sex. Go! Wow, that was awkward. Did we, did we know at the time Todd and I, how awkward that was? That song's called Rough Sex. Sheesh!

That was men. Mad, awkward. No idea how Todd stumbled across Lords of Acid. Almost a rave vibe to Lords of acid, I thought, near as I could tell. The fuck did I know. We didn't dance. Let alone rave. Any unexpected CD in Todd's CD binder? Any deviation from the hard rock super macho chart topping orthodoxy of 90s radio and MTV? Any album that was not one of the albums issued by the government to sullen suburban teenagers. Any CD I didn't already own that Todd suddenly owned

struck me as a troubling betrayal almost of me personally. What is this? I've never heard of this. Is this new CD a threat to me? I was sensitive to Todd's moods, his bouts of winsome teenage arrogance, his various thwarted yearnings,

his fitful evolutions or de-evolutions. It all started to go wrong, from my perspective anyway. It all darkened or Todd darkened at a frightful and accelerated rate, compared to me anyway, when Todd discovered and fell in love with Marilyn Manson. Todd and I driving to the other Denny's,

the rock and roll Denny's, listening to a song called Cake and Sodomy. Todd got super into Manson, just Manson, last name basis, super into the spoon-feed-you-maggots, gnarliness of Manson. Todd started writing Marilyn, Marilyn Manson inspired poetry and reciting it to me and also to the girls in your dreams of liquid light. That's either Todd's phrase or Manson's.

I forget I was unnerved. I was hesitant. I could follow Todd only so far down this spiral. A rift formed maybe. A canyon cracked open between us. The beginning of the end, Manson was. But not yet. Not at 7.15 in the morning while I was holding the sausage and egg meat muffin.

Sorry about that. Too many reveries. Todd is driving me to school. I estimate 7.15 a.m. because school started at either 7.30 or 735. And we'd have been on time because we were good kids who followed the rules. All pretensions of deviance aside. So we hit the McDonald's near the Super Kmart for breakfast. Now we're driving to school, driving north on Pearl Road near the golf course there, about to turn right on either Hamilton or Remsen. That's when it happened. In this moment, we're tired, we're pissed about being tired, we're groggy, we're sullen, we're silent. alone with our breakfasts and alone with our thoughts and also his thoughts. Todd loved 9-inch nails the most. He loved Trent Rezner the most. And in this, I did not hesitate. I loved him too. Trent, I mean, I loved him almost more than anybody. Certainly, I loved Trent Reznor more than I loved myself.

Hurt by 9-inch Nails. Last song in the Doward Spiral from 1994. Somehow I hadn't heard this song before. You know it's coming, but I don't. I am riding shotgun and Todd Saturn at 7.15 a.m. I am driving north on Pearl Road. I am holding a sausage and egg McMuffin, about to turn right on Hamilton Road, I think. I don't see it coming.

And then it does. I want to tell you that I jolted so hard that the sausage and egg McMuffin flew out of my hand and hit the ceiling or hit the windshield or hit Todd or flew out my open window. But that's whimsy. right the details are already suspicious to me was this really the first time i heard the song hurt didn't i own the downward spiral already or was i devouring this record very slowly track by track like a boa constrictor and i just hadn't gotten to the last song yet that doesn't matter what matters is that jolt that blast of distortion that jump scare is still vivid to me and precious to me what matters almost as much as why Todd and I loved Trent Reznor so much in the first place. We loved him because he's the guy

who got this on the radio. No, no, no, wait, wait. That wasn't on the radio, silly. Let's do this properly. This is an all-time, goofy radio edit. Respect is due. Much better. That's the version I remember. The dead space. So chaste. You just picture Joe Lieberman being like, yes, that's it. I've the impressionable teenagers. Do you remember this one? I don't think I do. This edit may just be a random Yahoo on YouTube. I don't know.

The whip crack feels a little overzealous. Yeah, a bit unsubtle. No need to oversell it. That's my job. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 70th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s. Not the 69th. The 70th.

Because making this song, number 69, would have been crude. This week we're talking about Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Perhaps you can tell that I've been sitting on this one for some time. All right, I'm getting into the whip, actually.

I'm coming around. Excellent, percussive edition. I've heard this song 500,000 times in my life. I'm down for some variety. Let a thousand unsubtle at its bloom. Obviously, obviously that was the Weird Al-Yankovic version.

From the alternative polka, obviously you remember the alternative poker. Oh my God. A word that pops up often in interviews with Trent Rezner in glossy magazine stories about 9-inch nails. A word that Trent himself often uses is demystification. Demystify. He worries that rock stars now, and now started around 1994, rock stars have demystified themselves. Rock stars now talk too much, take too many photographs. slather themselves on too many magazine covers and in general do too much explaining, not to mention tweeting. They're ruining everything. They're ruining the illusion.

We know too much about them. We know too much about him. Is this even helpful? Tram-Resner was born in 1965 and grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, in northwest Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border. In my experience, the only thing worse than being in Ohio is being near the Ohio border in any direction, right? No.

Okay, Trent was something of a piano prodigy. His piano teacher thought if Trent devoted his life to it, he could be a concert pianist, but Trent balked in part because he thought pianist sounded like penis. Trent did an interview in 2017 with the journalist David Markezy for Vulture, one of my favorite Q&A situations in recent memory.

And he was talking about growing up in Mercer and toxic masculinity in the internet and rock stars who tweet too much. And Trent says, growing up, I didn't know what Pink Floyd looked like, and I didn't need to know. In my mind, they looked like fucking wizards, man. I remember seeing a picture of Super Tramp, and I loved Breakfast in America, and I was like, what the fuck? End quote.

I too loved the 1979 Super Tramp album Breakfast in America, and I will concede that Super Tramp were not the coolest-looking guys in town. They looked like the third, ninth, 16th, 45th, and 200th place finishers in a Charles Manson lookalike contest. A whole lot of hair and not a lot of swagger in Super Tramp visually. But mostly now, I just want to know what Trent Resner thought Super Tramp looked like. Wizards, I suppose. Trent thought Super Tramp looked like fucking wizards.

Near-sighted racquetball playing Wizards. Trent keeps complaining about this to Vulture, he says, and forget photos. I didn't know anything about them. Something in me needed the people making the music I loved to seem larger in life. I needed heroes. David Bowie was a fucking alien. You know, as it happens, he was a fucking alien. I was lucky enough to be friends with him and he was even cooler than I'd thought. But demystification is a real problem. There have been people whose music, I can't like anymore because I've seen them bitching on Twitter about a waiter like a fucking asshole. End quote. Trent Resner used to be on Twitter, but he quit because he couldn't stop yelling at trolls.

He'd get so pissed. It was great. Okay. Did that help? Is context useful? Does it help you to know what Trent Resner looks like? Sure. He's a glowering, angrily handsome rock star-looking dude.

He was intimidating when he was super scrawny and intimidating later when he got super jacked. Does it help you to know he's 5-7? No, honestly, I thought he was taller. Does it help you to know he briefly went to Allegheny College in Pennsylvania? He told Spin Magazine, I was going to college for computer engineering and I thought, I love music. I love keyboard instruments. Maybe I can get into synthesizer design. The excitement of hearing a human league track and thinking, that's all machines.

There's no drummer. That was my calling. It wasn't the sex pistols. end quote he dropped out roundabouts 1984 he moved to cleveland which is within the ohio border for all the good that does it blah blah blah oh forget it it's time to remistify trant resner trant resner was a fucking alien wizard who crash landed on this planet in 1989 and descended from the burning mountain top with two stone tablets one of the stone tablets said soul and the other one said hole.

Yes, head like a hole. Lead off track on Nineish Nails debut album, Pretty Hate Machine. There's other glowering dudes in this band, eventually, live mostly, but for our purposes, and usually for his, Trit Resner and Nineish Nails are synonymous. He is it. He is them. No offense, but I'd think real hard before joining a band led by this guy. As an 11-year-old in 1989, I bowed down.

before MTV and what I deserved was more MTV. And there's Trent Reznor and Nine H. Nish Nails on MTV. Trent's got jet black, super long, almost dreadlocked hair in this era. He looks like the predator. If the predator sunburned easily, there's like wires and menacing black tape strewn everywhere menacingly. I'm glad I didn't have to vacuum the set of this video afterward. Rad video, super intimidating. I'm not joking. As an 11 year old, I was super intimidated. Trent Resner, the alien wizard, invented industrial music as far as I was concerned. Let's skip the part where I drop like 15 band names from throbbing gristle forward in a nervous attempt to convince you. I don't actually believe that. Mistify. We're mystifying. Trent Resner

invented industrial music. Industrial music here to find as sad, angry men emoting, disconcertingly amidst noisy machines. Here we got a song called Diggin. from a Canadian industrial band called Skinny Puppy. I'm name dropping. I can't out myself. This is from Skinny Puppy's 1986 album, Mind, the Perpetual Intercourse. That's mind colon, the perpetual intercourse. Just clarify, that's colon, as in the punctuation mark.

Not the, oh, Rob, okay. All right, plenty of unnerving clanging machines here, but we're a little light on the emoting. Yeah? let's get some emotion. Let's get some star power. Let's get as close to rapping as Trent Resner ever got. Here's track three on Pretty Hay Machine.

It's called Down In It. Trent was happy to tell anybody that Skinny Puppies Digit inspired Down in it. I'll leave it to you if Down In It constitutes an improvement on Digit, but it's certainly a refinement. There's a pop song bounce and a pop song gloss to Down in it. This song appears on an album. with a tremendously marketable title, Pretty Hate Machine,

which was an improvement, objectively, on the album title, Mind, Colon, the Perpetual Intercourse. And Trent's got undeniable, gargantuan star power, too. Trent's vocals are emotionally fraught, and more importantly, they're clean, they're discernible, they're human. The way Trent explained it to Spin Magazine, he said, Pretty Hate Machine was about juxtaposing human imperfections against very rigid, sterile, cold arrangements.

You can't just have icy vocals over icy music. If the music is very precise, make a vocal tape that's less perfect. So you've got this meshing of man versus machine, end quote. An insidiously catchy chorus helps as well. Even the music videos for Dig It and Down in it are quite similar, aesthetically. lots of shaky, unsettling epilepsy warning footage of people running down fire escapes. That's a central image in industrial music, apparently. People running down fire escapes.

Tratt Resner had the hooks also, the disturbingly childlike synthesizer hooks. Melodically and lyrically, he could be childlike, but also super menacing. It was weird. You're sitting there watching MTV and you're like, why does this sense? sounds so badass. Trent was in his way emoting here, unburdening himself.

If you can't rage against the machine, rage with it, cry with it, whine with it, grouse about various indifferent sexy ladies. He told Spin, quote, it was all stuff out of my journal. This wasn't a character singing lyrics.

This was my guts in a song. I still think about that sometimes. Now, Pretty Hate Machine has sold a ton of copies, and I'm dismissed by some as a caricature or cartoon. But when I wrote this thing, that wasn't a character singing. And I didn't know if I wanted people to know that much about me. End quote. So there's me at like 14 riding shotgun and Todd Saturn blasting pretty hate machine for the two billionth time.

And yeah, I thought I knew Trent Rezner. But more importantly, I thought he knew me. me riding shotgun and Todd Saturn is he drives us to fucking friendlies the ice cream joint the fish bowl peanut butter cup Sunday five scoops of ice cream with a peanut butter sauce oh man driving under yet another gunmetal

northeast Ohio sky imminent ice cream Sunday notwithstanding I'm feeling morose the vibe is hilariously glum my forehead is resting morosely against the passenger side window. My hair gel is smudging up Todd's glass. And I'm feeling just extravagantly sorry for myself. And I'm listening to Trent Rezner belt out a song called Something I Can Never Have.

And I'm wondering how close to something Trent Reznor can never have is to the something Tratt Resner can never have. Pretty close, right? We're quite similar at the bottom of everything. He gets me. He practically is me. Just one. I saw a 9-inch Nails Live in 2009 at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City in my cool New Yorker years.

Yes, this was a fabled intimate club show. It was fucking rad. I believe this was the 9-inch Nails retirement tour. Trent did not actually retire, of course. So at this show, they do something I can never have, right? And the bass player switches to upright bass. And my mind is instantly blown. I am 14 again.

I am uncool. I am awed. I am once again bowing down before the one I serve. And so this something I can ever have starts with the bassist. He's got the giant upright bass, and he slowly drags his giant bow across the strings. Ooh. Ooh.

And I still think about what an enormously powerful and overwhelming moment this was for me in real time. That exact moment. A song so ingrained in me. A morose synth bass line so ingrained in me to see it rendered right in front of me, 50 feet away, in such a theatrical, physical manner, the bow scraping across the strings. Northeast Ohio is now New York City, and lame teenage rob is now lame adult Rob. And Scronny Trent is now jacked Trent, right? His arms are raised.

He's clutching his microphone with both hands. His jacked muscles are bulging, and he's about to just emote all over the place. He still can't never have it, whatever it is. And neither can I. Yeah, what it did, what these three upright base notes did to me, standing in a nightclub in New York City in 2009, was dropped me right back in Todd Saturn in like 1993. A sullen teenager, forehead resting against the passenger side window glass,

hair gel gleaming and the fading sunlight, staring out at the dismal but also tremendously romantic dishwater gray panorama of Northeast Ohio, the baseline to something I can never have, scraping across my puny little heart as we drove to the other friendlies. The friendlies 20 minutes away near all the movie theaters. Years of my life. Arguably the most important and formative years of my life. Riding Shotgun in Todd Saturn, listening to Todd's CDs, thinking my self-pitying little thoughts as Todd thought his. all of this was and is just unimaginably precious to me corny as it all might have been then todd stole my girlfriend and that was the end of that oh todd the point is by 1991 trant resner and nine inch nails and scare quotes industrial music

are all tremendously vital elements of my sullen teenage identity i worship trant resner in part because he scares the bejesus out of me. First Lalapalooza lineup era, Trent Resner scares the bejesus out of me. Sunburn Predator up there, thrashing about and smashing his keyboards to dust and blowing everyone else off the stage. Or so I have

read, I was way too young and terrified to actually attend the first Lollapalooza in 1991. Trent told Spin, the entertainment factor of our show got proven at Lalapalooza. We'd filtered into mall culture a little bit. For a while, it was

trendy to like our band. Then that quickly got dismissed because the little sister of the trendy person started wearing a nine inch nails t-shirt and then we weren't cool anymore. End quote. Ouch. He also says, I wanted to be tough. I was so concerned about staying alternative that indie bullshit mentality. After Lalapalooza, I had this snotty elitist mentality.

You're not cool enough to like my band. Don't buy my records. I wanted to make a fuck you record. It was also a bit of a knee jerk. I'm not a pussy. I'm not a sellout attitude. End quote. Yeah, at 14, I was definitely not cool enough to like his band.

But unfortunately for him, I fucking loved his fuck you record. There he is. There's our alien wizard. The 11th commandment, thou shalt rhyme soul with whole on every record. Nine inch nail put out an EP called Broken. in 1992, it's called Broken because Walmart wouldn't have sold it to me. If Trent had called it, fuck you. This record is way louder and harsher and scarier and more hateful than Pretty Hay Machine,

but it is also arguably and troublingly prettier. This song is called Wish. I've heard this song 300,000 times and I didn't find out until just now that that line was 26 years on my way to hell. I'll be darn. I was right there with him at 14, man. You ready? You know what's coming and so do I. You sure you're ready? Okay. Here it comes. Another thing I did at the Bowery Ballroom in 2009 has raised my fist in the air and scream fist fuck in unison with 500 other people. It was glorious. I was having all the fun. I could relate to this big time in 1992 back when I, too thought I hated everyone and thought I was having all the fun doing it. I love industrial music. Industrial music is the best music ever made. Nobody knows more about industrial music than I do. Can you tell I was self-conscious about this at 14 and also at my current age? I truly did get an awfully powerful you're not cool enough to light my band vibe from Broken, which only made it more illicit. I knew

what I didn't know about 9-inch nails. Part of becoming a 9-inch-nails superfan is realizing that you are not, by a long shot, an actual 9-inch-nails superfan relative to actual superfans. I was and I remain an amateur. I did not collect the halos. Every 9-ish-nails releases a halo, including singles, EPs, remix albums, etc. I did not and do not need all the halos. I'm sorry. I feel better knowing that there are like a half dozen canonical remixes of head like a hole in the permanent record, but I don't need to own them or listen to them one after the other. Don't ask me if the copper mix is better than the soil mix. I could not and cannot get down with the gnarlier, goryer, more X-rated aspects of the Nine-ish Nails experience. Speaking to you as a person who

cannot watch horror movies, and that's can only read the plot summaries of horror movies on Wikipedia. I cannot hang with the mega grody videos for these songs on broken, that VHS tape. No, I will not elaborate. You want me to say it? I'll say it. Don't get involved. And in high school, I was scared. Like legitimately viscerally frightened of all the other fairly popular and cuddly industrial bands I perceived as even one degree gnarlier and harsher and more hateful and less commercial than nine inch nails. I had a weird, illogical psychic block that kept me from getting into, say, a band like Ministry. Ministry out of Chicago, led by Al Jorgison, a lot of heroin imagery. I don't want to talk about heroin, but make a note of it. Ministry came out of the wax track scene in Chicago that

was big in the late 80s and served as a tremendous skinny puppy-esque influence for Trent out in Cleveland around then. Chicago is a five-hour drive from Cleveland, but even if culturally it feels much farther, I couldn't deal with ministry in high school. Too scary. But you want the absolute scariest, the most intimidating, the quote-unquote industrial band I truly believed I wasn't cool enough or at least tough enough to even listen to or think about. KMFDM. KMFDM are primarily German. Maybe that accounts for my unease. They got a really striking and unsettling album cover aesthetic going most of the time, a super adult comic book vibe, whiffs of Russian propaganda, the font.

is really cool and badass. Their album title is usually one badass looking word. It's a whole disconcerting vibe. This song is called A Drug Against War, and it's on the album, Anxed from 1992. Onxed, perhaps that's pronounced. Don't ask me. I coward in fear of this band in high school. Somehow I am not even joking.

This song is also on the Onxed album. It's called Sucks. We don't like eating our vegetables. I feel quite silly now, how shook this band used to make me. I fear that I am retaliating now. I'm trying to save face now by convincing myself that they're the silly ones. Actually, the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction, and now I've got this uncontrollable impulse to make fun of KMFDM for no reason.

No green beans. We want more pizza. This is ridiculous. This is a very hard mental loop for me to get out of them. Now basically imagining that I'm babysitting, the members of KMFDM. I don't know if there's a rock band in history that I have a stranger

or more antagonistic personal relationship with. This song is pretty clearly funny on purpose. Tip or Gore could have maybe sent the Secret Service after them, but that's even funnier. It's rude of me to hold my teenage apprehension toward KMFDM then

against KMFDM now. Let's be reasonable about this. We're not tired. Let us stay up till 930. Ridiculous. Have some respect for KMFDM. Rob, I do actually respect KMFDM. One time in high school I was at this kid, Bryce's house.

Not his real name, but it was his real house. Bryce was a popular kid, super smart, varsity athlete. His girlfriends were all hot, if I recall. Correctly, he had it all. I was impressed. I was jealous. I'm at a party at Bryce's house. The first and the last time this happened,

I feel pretty cool for once. I just assume we're surrounded by hot girls who will not talk to me, but we'll talk to him. But Bryce is talking to me. Only me. We're in his basement. He's got a little boombox type CD player. And he's like, hey man, check this out. And he puts in the KMFDM album Nyhill from 1995. He plays me a song called Flesh. He starts blasting a song called Flesh out of this boombox at truly incredible volume. And Bryce starts barking, starts like half screaming along with this song, like right up in my face. I can still picture the look on his face. The contorted fury of Bryce, the popular kid who's got it all. I can hear I'm going, this is the dome of my betrayal.

This is the final broken nail. I want more screen time. I was not so much frightened as genuinely concerned for him. Bryce was revealing to me in this moment some sort of fraught inner darkness. And I just sort of sat there, alarmed and immobile, letting his fury wash over me. And I'm thinking, man, what the hell is going on with Bryce? Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did he just rhyme soul with hole? He did.

Didn't he? Hmm. Hmm. The plot dickens. I was still writing shotgun and Todd Saturn for hours and hours at this point. And thus, this impromptu primal scream, KMFDM listening party should not have shocked or even really surprised. me. It should not have been news to me that my fellow teenagers, even the cool ones with hot girlfriends, were also raging against and also with various machines. But narcissism and myopia is a crucial

part of being a teenager. Two, you're so convinced nobody else gets it. You buy an album that ultimately sold like 3.7 million copies in the United States alone, but you convince yourself you're alone. This album is for you alone. You alone understand it. And it only understands. you. No further offense to them, but I don't mean any of KMFDM's albums. I mean this one. I implore you to watch the video for March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails. March of the Pigs, the first single, and this will always be the funniest thing in world history to me, the first single off the Nine Inch Nails album, The Downward Spiral, released in 1994. Halo 8. If you care about Halos. Halo 7 was actually the March of the Pigs single. If you care about Halos, I do not. But this is

still one of my favorite records of all time. The video for March of the Pigs, you got to watch. You got to rewatch this shit. I'm going to use the version of this song from the video, actually, which gives you a better idea of why this song is a radio single was so goddamn funny. Yikes. Somebody on Twitter was just talking about how world historically rad this video was. I think it was Matt Perpetua, who does Flux Blog. The March of the Pigs video is a sort of sardonically stylized and chaotic one-take live performance with a full band. We're closer to Scronny Trent than Jacked Trent.

His hair is even blacker now, as if that's possible. He's got long black gloves and a long-sleeved black fishnet shirt situation, presumably to combat sunburn. He looks pissed. He looks so pissed. He's amused with himself at how pissed he is. It is truly extraordinary how unaccommodating this song is, despite it still being catchy. That's a dumb word.

Alluring? No, mesmerizing. Oh, shut up. March of the Pays is just about as pretty as hate gets. But it's actually the quiet part of March of the Pigs, the several consecutive seconds of total silence that makes this song the funniest lead radio single of all time. Yes, that clonking noise amid the silence was Trent dropping his mic, tossing it, really?

That's how badass he is. I should be joking, but I'm not joking. Him throwing his mic stand around, almost tripping over the mic chord, tackling his bandmates, almost plowing over the keyboard player, who by the way looks just stoned out of his gourd. The keyboard player looks so confused. etc. It's also contrived that it should look funny and corny, but what's even funnier and more intimidating is that all this tough guy, tomfoolery, doesn't look corny at all. This is industrial

rock star grandstanding, so choreographed that it swings all the way back around looking feral and uncontrollable and awesome. If I keep talking about this, I'm going to convince myself that this is the best music video of the 1990s. That's actually weird on Yankevix's Bedrock anthem. This is how the downward spiral was introduced to the world. Or more to the point, because I'm the only person who heard or understood or was understood by this album. This is how the

downward spiral was introduced to me. I'm sorry, did I say 9-inch Nail sold 3.7 million copies of this record in the United States? I misspoke. Nine-inch Nail sold one copy of this record to me, and I played it 3.7 million

times. Typically, an episode of this show, whatever this song is I re-listen to the album that song is on anywhere between five and six hundred times, right, to reacquame myself with it, to refresh my memory. I don't have to do that for the downward spiral. This is music that I no longer need to hear. I don't have to do that for the downward spiral. This is music that I no longer need to play out loud to hear. I am listening to the downward spiral right this second. I will never again in my life. not be listening to the downward spiral.

I can recite this record for you the same way I can recite my social security number. Do you get me? I'm not bragging. I'm still not claiming to be a nine-inch nail superfan. Objectively, I am not. I got zero halos in this house. I'm just telling you that this record is an organ in my body that just so happens to not physically be inside my body. And my question for you is,

How fucked up does that make me? This song's called heresy. I was raised Catholic. Complications ensued. Stay out of it. I'm just going to tell you that this song went against everything I'd been told by virtually everyone I loved. As a teenager, every time this chorus hit, I didn't even blink. I just thought, well, maybe.

I think a lot about me at 16 years old, listening to this record 3.7 million times. I wonder what it tried to teach me. I wonder what I learned. This song's called I Do Not Want This. I appreciate that it ends with Trent repeatedly stating what he does want. And the things he wanted struck me as the ideal things to want. Yes, including that part. Why don't we get the worst part out of the way, actually?

Yes? Okay. This song's called Big Man with a Gun. Trent took a lot of shit about it. See Dolores Tucker, the civil rights activist and politician, and frequent Tupac. antagonist in this era see dolores tucker did not care for this song either spin magazine pressed trend on it and he said this song was in part quote making fun of the whole misogynistic gangster rap bullshit end quote yeah i don't know but he also said to spin if i'd had a couple more

months to look back on everything i probably would not have put that song on the record just because i don't think it's that good as song not because i got spanked for it end quote i do agree with that the message gets more dangerous, the better the song gets. This song's called Reptile. It's about how she's a reptile. This is about as gnarly and dehumanizing as the grousing about indifference sexy ladies genre gets. And as a musical proposition, this song is both harrowing and wildly beautiful. And I loved it then and I love it now. Even if the notion of me loving it then worries me very much. That's so beautiful. musically. I'm serious. I'm still very worried. Hey, did you hear the downward spiral was recorded

in the house in L.A. where Charles Manson's goons killed those people? I heard about that. Very possibly in a high school cafeteria. And the amount of thought I gave it beyond, whoa, that's badass. It's just about the amount of thought Trent Reznor gave it. At least at first, near as I can tell, until interviewers started asking him about it 500,000 times. We were all so young and naive and insensitive then. This song's called Piggy. Oh, well, I thought it was so cool and so profound. How many times Trent Rezner sang,

Nothing can stop me now over the course of this album. I wanted to be that cool and that determined. But I do wonder now, hypothetically, what nothing could stop me from doing when I was 16. Drooling, perhaps. For 20 years, I've been reading Trent Rezner in interviews, complained about demystification, about knowing too much about Rastars and how they make their albums. And I always understood what he was saying, but I never felt it. I never myself got upset

about demystification until I started reading too much about how the downward spiral was made. Contest is unhelpful to me. The truth is unhelpful to me. Trent told Spin, on downward spiral, I got to explore making an electronic record that doesn't sound electronic for some parts of it. We did things with drums that I don't know if anyone has really done. We sampled drums and stereo with stereo mics and discovered if you play them on a keyboard, it sounds like you're sitting behind the drums for real. On March of the Pigs, Eraser and those songs, there's no live drums, but it alluded to being real because it didn't sound like a machine.

No way someone could play like that. It further added a kind of mind fuck to it. Instead of falling into a ministry-type trap of how, I can make things harder and harder. It's scarier to have something creep up on you. End quote. That's not scarier. Dude, I'm upset.

It was apparently very important to me to believe that the drums on the downward spiral were played by a human playing a drum set, you know, humanly. I am going to continue to believe that the song, Peggy, is a human playing drums. Even when the drums get super bonkers near the end, it upsets me the idea of letting go of this illusion. It upsets me almost as much as this upsets me. This song's called the downward spiral. He shoots himself. So much blood for such a tiny hole. I'm going to say this very quickly and directly. The thought of my oldest son, who is 11 years old now, listening to this song, is very upsetting to me. The argument over what negative effect this record might have had on an

impressionable teenager hits me way differently. Now, that I am not the teenager. That's all I have to say. I would like to change the tone in here as quickly as possible. And so let me ask you, have you seen the video of the guy singing closer by 9-inch Nails at karaoke? But he's singing it to the karaoke track of the Ghostbusters theme song? I cannot believe this is real.

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my house. life. I cannot believe this. This is just a video on Twitter. You're watching the guy from behind. He's got a black hoodie on. He's rocking back and forth. The fact that he's not jacked enough is the only reason that this can't actually be Tratt Resner. In the lower right-hand corner, there are two semi-comfortable patrons in this bar sitting in a table bopping along to this guy. Closer is a song that I suspect you've heard 500,000 times and thus don't need to hear again now in granular detail. And also in this moment, what this karaoke guy is saying about this song is way more perceptive than anything I could say about it. This guy wins life, or at least wins karaoke.

This guy did something that mattered. And what the guy who won karaoke is saying is that closer is awesome. And also he's saying that it's a pop song, catchy, alluring, mesmerizing. It's a perfect pop song. It's a radio worthy pop song. A pop song that deserves its ubiquity. A subversive pop song. Yeah, fine.

Here's the one concrete thing I have to say about closer, actually. You know what's more subversive than writing and singing and releasing this song? Putting this song on the radio. The first radio DJ who played this song on the radio was more subversive, was breaking more taboos and shattering more sociocultural norms than the guy who wrote and sang and released it. I don't care what radio edit you use. This chorus still says what it says. I would like to read to you now the full text of a question Trent Reznor received in 2013

during his Reddit AMA. Ask Me Anything. This is the Reddit user of the great Jesse posing a question in a very public forum to Trent Resner. This came up in that rad vulture interview much later. Here we go. Quote, When you say you want to fuck me like an animal,

does it mean, one, I want to have sex with you in the same manner that animals have sex. Two, I want to have sex with you in the same manner. I usually have sex with animals.

Three, my desire to have sex with you is akin to the level of sexual desire that animals feel. or four is it really two separate thoughts i want to fuck you like an animal your immediate response is appreciated end quote trend didn't answer i do think that question answers a lot though doesn't it see i don't worry about myself at 14 hearing closer on the radio or hearing the uncensored closer on the downward spiral i don't worry about what i thought about it at the time because what i thought about it was, dude, this is awesome. And I was right. It was and remains awesome. I'm going to go play this

for my 11 year old right now. I'm just kidding. It is uncomplicatedly awesome. The weird and grody and semi-censored mark romantic video for Closer is awesome. The three-minute industrial funk keyboard breakdown that constitutes the whole second half of Closer is awesome. I memorized every keyboard sound in this song, the same way I memorized all the battles in the Civil War in history class. Let's just say I don't remember shit about the Civil War now. Industrial funk is a glib phrase, but nonetheless, the 33 and a third book series about classic albums, the book in that series about Pretty Hate Machine, written by Daphne Carr, that's a great book.

And it talks a lot about Cleveland and deindustrialization and white flight. And Daphne points out that Nine Inch Nails is as influenced by black music as a white music, the almost rapping, the bumpious bass lines, the extremely frank sex talk. Trent Razner thanks Prince in the liner notes to pretty hate machine. He samples Prince. And closer is as much an R&B song as an industrial rock song and that you can dance to it. And it's just about as frank as sex talk gets. You can imagine like Usher singing closer. That too would be awesome. It is easier now to find on the internet the uncensored version of the closer video,

which is too bad. I submit to you that the censored version of the closer video, which I saw 10,000 times on MTV was better and more dangerous and subversive. In the edit, every tiny little clip MTV wanted to cut is just replaced with a title card that says scene missing. And I guarantee you that whatever a corny 14-year-old kid imagines is in that missing scene is way more graphic and inappropriate than whatever is actually missing. I finally watched the uncensored version. There's a naked lady in it.

In this way, and in only this way, the stuff in my teenage head was way narlier than the stuff in Trent Resner's head. I meant to say something else about Hurt, the Nine-Each Nails song. I meant to say something about Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, the Mark Romantic video for Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt. arguably the single greatest music video ever made. The scene where Johnny Cash is sitting at the lavish banquet table, and he looks terrifically old, and you fully register that Johnny Cash knows he's going to die soon,

and he takes the goblet of wine and he pours it on the table, which ordinarily is a very broad, cheesy, eye-rolling music video gesture, right? Like pouring the wine on the table. But Johnny's hand is shaking terribly as he pours it. That's the precise moment the hurt video becomes the greatest music video ever made. This broad, corny, invincible rock star gesture elevated, sanctified even by this tiny, sincere, frail, shattering human gesture. The downward spiral by nine inch nails has, in its own way, a moment like that, a sanctifying, vulnerable human moment. It occurs on the song, Ruiner.

This is the song right after Closer on the track list. That's what Ruiner sounds like most of the time. But this song also has a breakdown near the end. A garage rock breakdown. It has a guitar solo. I say garage rock because it sounds like a guy playing a guitar solo in his garage. More than any clip of any song I played on this show this whole time, I wish I could play you the full 65 seconds of this part of Ruiner.

The way the bass comes in, then the guitar solo, then the drums. This is my favorite part of the whole album. This is arguably my favorite 65 seconds of recorded music. There's something so fragile and vulnerable about this whole sequence. And I think why I get upset about demystification, about even the live drums on the downward spiral being played through computers, is because it's important to me to imagine this part as a person.

Maybe Trat Resner, maybe someone else, maybe me, physically playing all the parts of this. The bass, the guitar, the drums, even the haunted house, howls in the background. The whole Ruiner guitar solo is the tiny, sincere, frail, shattering human gesture buried deep in this monolithic industrial rock star machine. And it peaks with this dorky little drum fill right here. There, right there.

I love that drum fill so much. It is so exquisite and so dorky and so human. It's as close as Trent Resner ever got to God. And hearing it now is as close as I'll ever get to being back in Todd's Saturn. I don't want to be back in Todd's Saturn anymore than Trent actually wants to be that close to God. But maybe adulthood, as Trent Resner and I both have learned, is just realizing you don't actually want the something you can never have. My guests today were thrilled to be joined by William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes,

the producers for the experimental rap group clipping. Their latest album is called Visions of Bodies Being Burned. William and Jonathan, welcome. Thank you so much, both of you for being here. Thank you for having us. Hey, thank you, yeah. Of course. So Jonathan, this morning, you sent me the 9-inch Nails remix of Puff Daddy's victory

featuring The Notorious BIG and Buster Ives. Then you said we definitely need something. Make sure you hear it right. Don't make a ass out of yourself by assuming. Then you said we definitely need to talk about this. I agree. The floor is yours. I don't have anything that's like super important.

You just asked us in the email like what we thought Nine H-Nish Nail's had to do with rap music. Yeah. And what's funny about that particular remix is that none of us had heard it when we started this band clipping. Like we heard it very recently in our lives. Yeah. No idea that existed. Because our frame of reference when we started clipping was how much we like that Saul Williams album that we thought was so good.

And we were like, there should kind of be a whole genre. There should be more things that sound like this, you know. I'd forgotten about that Saul Williams record Trent produced in the mid-2000s, but there's rap music and Ninish Nails from the very beginning. Like he's almost rapping on down in it. I hear a lot of public enemy, the Bob Squad, and the way he uses samples and noise. Closer is a really aggressive R&B song. if you look at it, right?

Trent got lumped in a lot with all the other angry white guys, 90s rock stars, but do you personally hear a lot of rap and funk and R&B in nine inch nails? I'd say definitely. I mean, yeah,

down in it is skinny puppies dig it plus rapping. And, you know, he kind of wraps on wish. Right. And, you know, he always talked about, you know,

really admiring prince and public enemy. and there's even samples of Eric B and Rakim on the first album and stuff like that, like this sort of collage electronic aesthetic. Yeah, there's some drums from Prince from Alphabet Street maybe. Is that? That sounds right. Yeah.

All of that early industrial music like has so much, so much to do with early rap music production too. It's like some of the, like, to me, it's like almost hard to tell the difference between like run DMC beats and early Front 242 on occasion. You know, there's so much, I feel I hear so much sort of synchronicity between that stuff and trend coming out of that kind of industrial music too. It makes a lot of sense to me. What I think was cool about that is he like, he obviously loved that stuff and he found a way.

I mean, this is something that is, I think, an inspiration to how we operate is like he found a way to contribute to and participate in and like be in conversation with like a cultural form that is not his own. Right. But in an honest way, he's not appropriating or ripping anyone off, but he is offering what his background has to offer to that. And rap is such like this cyberpunk collage aesthetic anyway,

that it can accept people outside of it and what they have to offer to it. And that's what we hope, at least the two of us are contributing to our rapper. Yeah, totally. So when did you guys first get into Nine Inch Nail? I was like, what was this song or the album that first did it for you?

I mean, I think the first thing I heard was probably downwards by right when it came out. It was a little later. I didn't hear a pretty hate machine until later. And I had a relatively sheltered musical upbringing, like I wasn't really allowed to listen to pop music of the radio. And I remember my cool cousin, you know, bringing it over and us listening to it on my stereo, like, really quiet.

So my mom would hear it. and like it kind of breaking my brain, but not in a way that I, that immediately like opened that tunnel for me to explore. Like it was years later that I, I think it's when I got into Apex Twin, but then I noticed he had done all those tracks on like further down the spiral and they had done some collaborations and things. And I sort of went back and then it and then it all kind of blew open. I have an older sister who's 11 years older than me and she was really cool. and she would come home. She's still.

I mean, for sure, for sure. But especially when when she left for college and, you know, I was in third and fourth grade, she would, every time she would come visit, she would bring me cassette tapes of whatever she was listening to. So I had a cassette tape of pretty hate machine in probably 89 or 90, pretty much right as it came out. Right. I remember, I remember anticipating the downright. spiral, knowing it was coming out that day when I was in sixth grade, I think, and like going to

the store. And for some reason, it had a parental advisory sticker and I didn't get in trouble. Sort of miraculously left with that in my clutches. My sister did it. My sister got me and do a lot of stuff. Cool sister and cool cousin. That's excellent. Did the downward spiral meet your expectations in that moment? When you listen to it, was it what you were on It felt to me at the time so much tougher than Pretty Hate Machine, which makes sense. I mean, and I don't know that I was particularly ready for that. I liked the sort of dancey pop. Sure.

Of Pretty Hate Machine. And Broken and Downward Spiral, both of which I just adore now, they took a little bit longer for me, partly because, like, I liked weird stuff. My sister also, you know, got me into like the butthole surfers and stuff like that. But there was so much sort of whimsy to that. It wasn't as just, you know, utterly dead-faced serious aggression. Yeah. I actually owned further down the spiral before I owned downward spiral.

And I remember going back to Pretty Hate Machine and having kind of the opposite reaction of like sort of what is this catchy pop crap. I thought I was listening to like noise and industrial. it took a while for that stuff to grow on me, which of course I love, I love that record now. And those are all remixes. Like you mentioned, like he did a ton of remixes early, right?

Like there's tons of head like a whole remixes. Like there's a whole disc, you know, fixed, you know, and then further down the spiral. Like, you know,

he invented the remix every bit as much as Puff Daddy did. Well, and there's the record closer to God, which is like an hour of remixes of closer by like coil and some other people and stuff too. Right. which is great. You guys did a long thread on Twitter about your struggle to clear the ghetto boy sample

on say the name on this new record. But you also mentioned that the long intense outro to that song was inspired by Nine-ish Nails. Like I hear a lot of closer in that and that's like the highest compliment I can pay anything. Like what about Nine Inch Nails were you inspired by or looking to emulate there and in general with the group? I don't know. I have this memory of like sort of tossing that idea out almost as a joke in the studio. Because I've always loved, like, the structure of Closer as, like, a radio hit to be like, right.

Oh, yeah, we're going to have about, like, a minute and a half of song, and then three minutes of instrumental outro has always felt like a really ballsy, like exciting structure for a track. And I sort of when we, because that song kind of like, the inspirations for that song were almost anything but, but once we had kind of made it. And we're like, you know, this kind of sounds like closer. Should we do this like sort of radical explosion? And I, you know, it's just like I love the idea of like the, the orchestration of a track or the

arrangement of a track having been so spare and so simple and so stripped down for so long. And then opening it up just for this outro, like felt really inspiring. And then my, you know, the particular nod to nine inch nails is the very last chord of this very minor key. song is that a major like a big pickerty third major key chord right at the end which he does all the time and is so satisfying to me but it actually came up because we had just been doing we had made pretty much the first half of the song as this sort of slowed down tribute to like the dance mania records from chicago which is like a ghetto house record label and we had looped that phrase which i'd been wanting to do i'd been pitching a song where we looped that phrase since before our first album was

done. And once we had actually slowed down the dance mania beat to hip hop tempo, we just, we went, oh my God, it sounds just like nine inch nails. So that was a weird revelation. We were like, oh, maybe there are these connections. That's what it, you know, house music is faster R&B. So maybe that is something he was already doing. And then, yeah, and then the long, sweaty, shaggy outro was adding new melodies that haven't been in the in the song until it becomes just instrumental. Yeah, that was the sort of joke. With closer, I just keep swinging back and forth between I can't believe this is basically his biggest song ever. And of course, this is his biggest song ever, right? Like to your minds, what makes closer the song for a lot of

fans? It is the, I mean, that that baseline is so funky and undeniable. it is definitely the grueviest of his songs in in that sense you know there's so much more sort of fast there a lot of them are fast a lot of them have these exploding choruses this is this slinky sort of sex jam which it's those drums too I mean I think those are sampled from an Iggy pop song right that's right night clubbing yeah yeah yeah really really Really? I didn't know that. The kicks, I hear it in the kick, but I don't hear it in the snares. I'm sure they did a lot to those drums, but there's something, they are so unique sounding.

They are not just like stock drum machine sounds and the way that they are part. Like, the drum sound is catchy. And then that bass is so deceptively simple. It's so, like, it's such a complex. There's so much movement. And I was just re-listening before this. And it's like, it's whipping around in the stereo field. and it's so like, like,

alive feeling, yet it's so like, sort of such a simple little groove. I don't know. It's incredibly catchy, and it's incredibly simple. Like so many of his songs have all of these layers, you know,

very vertically dense, right? Mm-hmm. And this one is not until that, until the end, until the outro, right, and then it's, you know,

and then it's, you know, when you're 14, a song that says, I want to fuck you like an animal. It is. is the coolest and most subversive thing you've ever heard.

Absolutely. That is absolutely true. Do we think, what do we think he means? Do we think he wants to fuck like he is an animal? The eternal question. Right.

Like he would fuck an animal. Yes. Our like animals would fuck. Yes. It's ambiguous. It is both somehow super direct and super ambiguous. I think all of those things can be true simultaneously. There we go.

all of the above. I've been reading a ton of old interviews with him, and he talks a lot about, like, seeking artistic extremes and, like, pushing boundaries and, like, sneaking subversive ideas into pop music. But he says, like, I'm not just trying to shock people the way, like, Marilyn Manson was trying to shock people. Like, is there a difference? Like, is there a right and a wrong way to write a song with the chorus?

I want to fuck you, like, an animal? Um, I, I wonder that. I certainly didn't ever get. I mean, he is, you know, I just, thinking about this, I just rewatched the broken VHS, which, boy, I hadn't seen. No, thank you. I was a video store clerk, you know, in high school. And that was something.

He really was, I think there's something cartoonish about like Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson that feel like these sort of layers of references. Whereas that trans aesthetic was always felt sincere in a way. And also working with people like Peter Christopher, Christopherson from Coil or Bob Flanagan is in that thing, which is probably the first time I saw Bob Flanagan right before he passed away. You know, he had these sort of high art collaborators. And he's not, it's not kidding.

You know, like, like, Rob Zombie, Marilynne Manson kind of feel like kiss to me a little bit. Not that I dislike Rob Zomby and Marilyn Manson's music. No, but it's different. You're absolutely right. There's a sincerity to it that is way more frightening. I can't deal with broken at all.

You're on your own. With the shock value, it's like, I always thought, you know, you can, there are ways to be like an aggressive, make aggressive music, to be a noise artist. And a common one is to be like, I, the artist, am punishing you the listener. Here I am, I am aggressive towards you.

I am making you hear, can't you hear my power? Right. Right. With this sort of. And nine inch nails has always been, has had aspects of that, but it's always felt more like, more masochistic than sadistic in that way, where it's more like, this is the sound of what it feels like to be in his brain. Yeah.

is sharing that with us. We are witnessing that too. He is, he is equally affected by that. But there's, there's definitely like a you and me against the world vibe to it too, right? It's like, this is what it sounds like in my brain. Like, we're in this together now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And that like, and that he's sharing it because maybe it's what your brain feels like to. And now you have an ally or something. There's something very welcoming about, about nine inch nails in that way for outcasts to me too. And that makes me also think like it's such, it's so essential to a nine inch

nails. The formula is that fragility of his human voice and the inhuman grinding of the music. And they seem like, he seems like he's just getting flattened by it sometimes. You know, just like this is a world that is just crushing him. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's almost never any like vocal processing or radical like vocal effect. Right. It's bare. I'm like like like like skinny puppy or Marilyn Manson, right? Or ministry. Yeah. Yeah, who are like in that, they're the sort of, they're in the same world. The vocal sits on top in Nite shows, which is I think another reason why it can, it's so poppy too.

Yeah. Like it's inaccessible because you can hear everything, every word he's saying. Yeah. Where do you guys come down on the fragile? Like, is it on the same tier as pretty hate machine in the downward spiral? Like, I love it, but I'm still intimidated by how like long and dense and overwhelming it is. It's my favorite one probably. Yeah.

I mean, well, it was my favorite one until he released that four-disc version of it. That's just instrumentals and outtakes. And now that's my favorite. I mean, I always, like, being who I am, I'm going to always like the longer, like, nerdier release. Like, ghosts is probably my other favorite one to listen to. I mean, I just loved how it was like sweeping and insane. decadent and operatic the fragile is. Yeah. Yes.

Absolutely. I love it. I don't find myself putting it on often, but it also came out at a weird time for me. You know, I remember just begging to go to the self-destruct tour, the tour for downward spiral. What, I must have been 11 or 12. And that was a conversation and an argument I lost. I was going to say, that's a tough sell for you at 11. But at the same time, you know, I hope my parents don't listen to this, but I was allowed to skateboard down to the Gilman because it was, it was 10 minutes away from the house.

But at the same age, I was going there. And I'm sure, like, if there wasn't the same type of security, there would have been at the warfield. I probably would have been safer at the warfield to see, you know, the Jim Rose Circus Side Show and Nighting Nail. Yeah, yeah. But, but yeah, by the time the fragile came out, out. I still loved them, but it wasn't, I had already, like, I'd committed myself, you know,

that my, my personality had become, oh, I'm in this underground scene and I don't need to go see them because I've cobbled together who I am, this sense of self out of these consumer products, not this one. Because the jocks at my school also like nine inch nails. Yeah, that's the problem. So he doesn't need me anymore. It's too big a tent now, nine inch nails. Yeah. The Fragile was the first one for me that I anticipated coming out and like read a lot of journalism about. And it was like right at the sort of dawn of my experience of the internet. So there were a lot of like new avenues for me to read about the production of it and stuff too,

which I didn't know anything about music production. But I can remember reading an interview with it must have been Charlie Klauser, but it might have been Alan Mulder about like he's like, oh yeah, just driving to the studio every day. I'd just like hold the recorder out the window. And then I'd get there and then listen back to the tape and like cut that. up and put that in a sampler and I was like, that is the best job. I can imagine. Like, this is, these are the coolest people and I want to do this with my life.

Hindsight is always 2020, but I can remember that record and that stuff and then like re-listening to that record and trying to hear all the sort of sound design choices being like incredibly formative. Well, I was going to ask when you listen to these records now, do you listen to them as producers? Like, can you tell what he's doing, what Gary is using the techniques, like, does it diminish the magic or do you just have more insight into exactly what's going on? I mean, I certainly wouldn't pretend to know exactly what's going on on any of these records, but, like, if anything, it, like, makes them more impressive some of the times.

Like, the times that I can't figure anything out or the times I know exactly what I think is happening and yet still in awe of how that sound came out of that technique or how they arrived at that decision, having, you know, nobody having done it before or something. I'm like, there are so many, sorry, go ahead. No, I mean, I just like that era of his studios and production and stuff is so, like, deeply romantic to me. Like, that's still what I like want my life. Like, he just put out the, the reissue, well, the first issue, I think of the score for

Quake, which is around that time. Right, right, right. That's right. And there were, there were all of these, like, really cool, like, inside studio pictures and, like, stories from that time. I just eat that shit up. I cannot get enough of learning about how Nineish Nails music in the 90s was made. There are still like specific sounds from individual songs that I feel like they're so

in my head that I'm always chasing those in our music too. Like the screaming loop in the becoming or that like that I love that. That broken fax machine sound in reptile. is just like, that's so incredibly satisfying. That's a great way to describe that because I do, it is like some sort of broken machine, you know? That's the becoming and, yeah, that's a wonderful song to me. Even all the like, even all the like vocal loops on all of like pretty hate machine,

even like, like, had like a hole at the beginning of it and stuff like that. That stuff is so, yeah, things that feel like that are still, like very, like, that's, that defined a lot. of our aesthetic. I think of it would work. I think about Lollapalooza 94, right? Like how iconic Nine Ish Nail's performance was and like how hard it is generally to translate these very electronics heavy recordings like to a rock star like live performance. Are those two different skill sets being like a studio guy and being like a stage guy? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. They've always been really good at both. We have a guy who does both and then we just stand in the background for the most part.

Somebody's got to stand in the background and just look cool, you know. We're not so good at that either, but you know. Is there footage from the Lollapalooza? I've definitely seen the Woodstock 95. I remember the Woodstock 94 before it's being like so. That's what I meant. I meant Woodstock 94. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Paloosa 91 and then Woodstock 94. The mud, right. That's, you know, that's. Oh, yeah, yeah. That and Green Day. right Woodstock

do I have it right that you guys just won a Grammy because you've got a song on the soundtrack to soul you know the Pixar movie Trineticus I got to see when this certificate shows up

exactly what the wording is because I find it I'm highly skeptical that we won a Grammy I'm going to say you won a Grammy and nobody can stop me from saying it no one on the Grammy committee is going to call me about it

I think yeah I think we get a certificate for having contributed to an album that did win the Grammy, but that we certainly did not win a Grammy. It's a congratulations way to go. What a bizarre thing to have happened to us. You made a 30-second long thing on an hour-long album that won a Grammy. It tied the whole thing together.

It just would not have worked without those 30 seconds. I don't even know, you know, there is no evidence that Reznor himself realizes our song was in the movie, that it was on the album, that it was in the end credits. Again, we didn't honestly know it had made it into the movie. We sent a demo and then there it was in the movie. Yeah, I've forgotten we made it, to be totally honest. Well, we make a lot of things really quickly. Even cooler. Yeah. For David's various projects, sometimes, you know, he's just like, oh, I just need a beat for this thing. And I said, you guys would make it. And like, okay, we just make it real quick.

And sometimes they come out and sometimes they don't. And, you know, just learn to do them pretty quickly and move on. Sure. And, but that one was fun. And then I didn't realize they had used it even. Right. Like, I don't think we ever had any confirmation that it had been used. Yes.

I just told my girlfriend, like, we, we, we, we, on a Grammy, like whoever the worst player on the 97 bowls has a ring. You were the Bill Cartwrights. I don't know if I have that right. I'd have to look that up. The Bill Cartwrights of the soul soundtrack. That's a great honor. Just to wrap up, like, in your experience, what is the secret, you know, to evoking terror

and menace and unease, like all those horror movie feelings, like just with audio? Like, can you articulate what Trent Resner does especially well? and like what you've learned from him that's made Clippings music so great in that way. I'm going to quote, I just had a conversation with Dean Hurley, who's David Lynch's main sound supervisor. And he said something that I thought was the funniest thing in the world that I now say all the time, which was that distortion is like MSG for abject terror. Wow. That's excellent. Yeah.

And I think there is something. about it's like distortion. I mean, you know, you're pushing a sound beyond the like boundaries of where it's supposed to be contained. And you're generating these harmonics like in the sort of upper register in the sound that just like evoke the idea that something's breaking or something's wrong or something's tearing or, you know, creates more high frequencies. It's like the combination of this like the like piercing high frequencies that we as

humans associate with snakes and distress cries and babies and hissens and it's that combination and the combination of base, right? Like really deep bass is like a sound that's made by a creature that must be bigger than you and that must be able to eat you. And it's like some sweet spot in there. It's low sounds and sounds that sound like babies crying like distress cries are really agit. Those frequency ranges are agitating to humans. No, I trust me, I know.

That makes perfect sense to me. The Grammy winning guys behind Clipping, thank you so much for being here. This is wonderful. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thanks very much to our special guests this week, William and Jonathan from Clipping. Thanks to our producers, Devin Ronaldo, Kai Grady, Justin Sales, and Jonathan Kerma. Thanks to the dude on Twitter

who sent me all this rad 9-inch nails footage from the David Letterman show. I love that guy. David Letterman and the guy who sent me all the footage. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here's 9-inch nails with Closer. We'll see you next week.