The 1995 song Trent Reznor will always regret: “At my worst”
Anything that Trent Reznor ever made wasn’t designed to be completely palatable to your average pop fan.
Nine Inch Nails was used to taking the building blocks of all of Reznor’s favourite acts and dismantling them in some way, and while that made for some truly grotesque sections of their music, they were also somewhat beautiful in their own messed-up way. Reznor understood that there was beauty in the musical ugliness, but he did feel like he let some of his heroes down every now and again as well.
But Reznor doesn’t really need to worry about whether his legacy is secure or not. When you’ve written a song so good that it managed to be covered by Johnny Cash, you’re clearly doing something right, and by the time that he came back after beating his addictions on records like With Teeth, he hadn’t lost a single step. He was still willing to crush anyone in his way, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t look back on pieces of his career and see a few blemishes in there as well.
The Downward Spiral is still one of the greatest works of art that the 1990s ever spat out, but The Fragile has moments that seem even more self-destructive. Reznor was not taking good care of himself around this point, and while it didn’t usually affect the music, he did admit to making a few rash decisions that probably weren’t the best ideas. Being able to work with someone like Marilyn Manson takes a good amount of ‘FUCK IT’ energy on its own, but Reznor at least knew he needed to come correct when working with David Bowie.
‘The Starman’ was the reason why he pursued music at all, and the fact that he saw anything in the industrial scene was enough for Reznor to practically melt. But the fact that Bowie thought enough to do a joint tour with Reznor was about more than just lip service. He wanted to see what made him tick, and Earthling was the sound of him and Reznor colliding from all angles in the song ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’.
Everything about the song seemed tailor-made for Bowie’s more jungle-inspired album, but Reznor felt that the whole thing was far from the best thing that he had ever made, saying, “I thought back to the time when we were together a lot, and I wonder what that could have been like if I was at 100%. ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ falls into that category of me at my worst – out of my mind and ashamed of who I was at that time.”
Adding, “So when I see that, I have mixed feelings – grateful to be involved, and flattered to be a part of it, but disgusted at myself, at who I was at that time, and wishing I had been 100% me.”
Admittedly, the song doesn’t seem to have the same kind of energy that mainline Nine Inch Nails songs do, but that actually works in Bowie’s favour. ‘The Starman’ wasn’t looking to push his vocal range into screaming territory all the time, and having him be the central figure while the glitchy beats do a lot of the heavy lifting is what makes the song sound great compared to the other experiments he did around this time.
And even if the song itself wasn’t all that fun for Reznor, getting to sing a duet of ‘Hurt’ with Bowie had to be a thrill for him to witness in real time. Here was one of his idols that he had spent years trying to figure out, and yet he was the one who was breathing life into one of his songs only a few years after he became one of the biggest names in music.
Reznor was never going to see Bowie as an equal by any stretch, but he could at least understand what he was going for when he worked with him. ‘The Starman’ had gone miles away from his glam period, and even if Reznor’s touch was another colour palette for him to work with, he wasn’t going to take a second of working with the industrial giant for granted, either.
