Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3)
Read Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) Online
Authors: Daphne Carr
PRETTY HATE MACHINE
Praise for the series:
It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom
Exile on Main Street
or
Electric Ladyland
are as significant and worthy of study as
The Catcher in the Rye
or
Middlemarch
… The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—
The New York Times Book Review
Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—
Rolling Stone
One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—
Bookslut
These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—
Vice
A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—
NME
(UK)
Passionate, obsessive, and smart—
Nylon
Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—
Boldtype
[A] consistently excellent series—
Uncut
(UK)
We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—
Pitchfork
For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit
33third.blogspot.com
For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book
By Daphne Carr
2011
The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright © 2011 Daphne Carr
“Buckle of the Rust Belt” map illustration © 2011 Scott Gursky
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carr, Daphne.
Nine Inch Nails′ Pretty hate machine / by Daphne Carr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8194-7
1. Nine Inch Nails
(Musical group). Pretty hate machine. 2. Rock music fans—
United States. I. Title.
ML421.N56C37 2011
782.42166092′2—dc22
2010043722
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in the United States of America
For Luke Patton
Before the
trench coat mafia
, there were other teen scapegoats in the suburbs.
Druggies, wastoids, losers, freaks, loners, poor kids, LD kids. Kids who’d transferred in; kids whose parents didn’t care, didn’t wash their clothes, didn’t pack lunches; kids whose parents were freaky religious and/or drunks. Kids who didn’t, couldn’t, or tried and failed to believe. Kids with speech problems, skin problems, or other problems. Kids whose parents grounded them for everything, for nothing. Kids who shot out the windows of school for fun, shot squirrels, burned things, cut themselves, snuck out, stole things, ran black markets. Kids who drew, played guitar, skateboarded, wandered from the smoking fence moon-eyed in the morning, wrote poetry, played video games or computer games or did things with computers that adults didn’t understand. Kids who hung out at Denny’s instead of Perkins because they knew their place.
Kids who already knew better than to check out books on the occult, home chemistry, sexual deviance, or mental disorders, so they threw them out the library window and picked them up outside. Kids who lived in basements, in small, rundown houses, in bad neighborhoods, across the tracks, with one parent, with grandparents, alone. Kids who hung out at the bowling alley or arcade, in parking lots, at coffee shops, bookstores, or Chinese restaurants, nursing drinks and scrounging dollars for cheap food. Kids who did not get cars at 16, new clothes in September, Lisa Frank folders, Air Jordans. Kids who stared too long, fell asleep in class, walked too slowly with their heads down, didn’t get the joke or made jokes no one else got.
Trent Reznor, the only long-term member of Nine Inch Nails, was one of those kids. He did not create teenage angst, but he gave it an early nineties voice and face. With his enormous success, he became a hero and a folk devil. Through his music and performances he united the black-clad masses—along with those not wearing black who were still dark—into one.
This is a book about those masses. I have often referred to NIN
1
fans as a trench coat mafia, and I will do so here in spite of, or because of, the term’s loaded history. It originated during the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999, when killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were still shooting inside the school. Two hours into the television coverage of the event, reports that a group called the Trench Coat Mafia might be responsible began to appear.
2
Students watching the news while still trapped inside the school repeated the story back to reporters once they’d fled. That the self-named Trench Coat Mafia of Columbine High—a
group of teens united through their love of computer gaming, extreme-music fandom, antischool sentiments, hacky sacking, and cowboy dusters—was largely disbanded by 1999 and had virtually no affiliation with the two murderers was ignored in the ensuing media spectacle.
Overnight, the word “Columbine” summed up and validated the nineties hysteria over teen violence, while the Trench Coat Mafia became a symbol of the enraged American middle-class white male teen perp.
3
It was a classic moral panic, a media-amplified vilification of a group whose real or imagined attributes threatened a social order.
4
In looking for someone to blame for the murderers’ rage, the media pointed to this “mafia,” found its members’ web pages and yearbook profiles, then implicated the popular culture that the group consumed.
Evidence soon rolled in showing that the Trench Coat Mafia was not responsible for the massacre—but also that the killers shared similar tastes with the group. The innocent and the guilty were lumped into one. The two killers, one a ruthless psychopath and the other a depressive follower, were portrayed as part of a complex, clandestine network that wreaked havoc on innocent kids on account of long-simmering ill will. (According to
Columbine
by David Cullen, this stylized infamy is exactly what one of the killers hoped for.) The panic was spread by follow-up reports questioning whether this kind of violence was imminent wherever unmonitored boys played first-person shooter games, watched violent movies, used anti-Christian expressions, or consumed any other mass-produced visions of antisuburban affect.
5
As for what music the Columbine “folk devils” listened to, look no further than Nothing Records. Launched in 1992 as a vanity label for Trent Reznor and John Malm Jr.
as part of Nine Inch Nails’ move to Interscope Records, Nothing was enjoying its highest moment of visibility with the goth-rock turned glam band Marilyn Manson. While it was reported later that Harris was a bigger fan of electronic music such as Orbital, Rammstein, and KMFDM, and that Klebold listened to Nine Inch Nails,
6
Manson’s image fit the panic’s narrative best, so the media played up the idea that Trench Coat Mafia members were Manson fans.
7
Yet with first-person shooter games “Doom” and “Quake,” as well as the movie
Natural Born Killers
also name-checked by the killers, the network of blame for the Nothing roster grew even stronger: Reznor made music for “Quake” and produced the soundtrack for the film.
Targeting Manson was easy in 1999, because the band had just spent three years in the media spotlight for its supposed assault on family values. Nine Inch Nails spent the early nineties singing of atypical desire, religious skepticism, and depressive mental states, and for this the band had received an increasing amount of negative attention from American social conservatives.
8
As a protégé of Reznor, Marilyn Manson added more of industrial’s self-reflexivity and goth’s camp to NIN’s themes, with lyrics and a stage show designed to call attention to the power of taboo and provoke public controversy. In the time between Manson’s first and second album, Interscope was publicly challenged by the National Political Congress of Black Women and the conservative lobby group Empower America.
9
The coalition claimed that Nine Inch Nails and the label’s gangsta rappers used “vulgar and misogynistic lyrics” to “glorify violence and promote it among children.”
10
It called for Interscope’s parent company, Time Warner, to divest, which the conglomerate promptly did.
Manson’s second album, the Reznor-produced
Antichrist Superstar
(1996), was a death-rock-opera mockery of
evangelical faith narratives. Conservatives took the bait and organized protests; politicians chastised the band’s lyrics and performances as pornography; and a senate subcommittee hearing on “music violence” was held in 1997—it included a parent’s testimony on Manson’s music as a “cancer” killing the nation’s teens, and Senator Joe Lieberman’s appeal for further divestment from Interscope.
11
When the events at Columbine exploded, the framework that would make Manson the apparent inspiration of murderous suburban teens had long been in place.