“Rock is dead”: The album Trent Reznor considered a massive “failure” but still adores
After reaching the top of the world in 1994 with The Downward Spiral, it actually seemed as though Trent Reznor had perturbingly foreshadowed his own future fate.
Typically, when you use phrases like that, it means that artists have rocketed off into the stratosphere upon their first major success and never looked back. However, for Nine Inch Nails, this was perhaps tragically not so, as after Reznor had poured his heart and soul into the magnum opus of his second album, the rest of the world simply wanted to mine from that devastating pit more and more.
Put simply, no one can keep going at that level of emotional intensity without turning into a hollow shell of a person. Reznor already had a fair idea of what dragged him to the brink – and the crutches he leaned on, often to his own detriment, to dull the pain. So, even with all the emotional landmines the ’90s threw his way, he still had enough self-awareness to realise he couldn’t keep barreling down the same path.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that Reznor was in some way bound to undergo a complete artistic pivot – he was considered the single brand ambassador of Nine Inch Nails for a reason, after all. They were always going to be the kings of the dark, brooding, and industrial scene, but what the masses perhaps didn’t realise quite so much at that point was that there is nuance within this steely guise. As such, when Reznor next produced The Fragile, to him it was still well within the bounds of everything he represented. To everyone else, it was dressed up as a failure.
This obviously seemed like a pretty unfair label in the artist’s eyes, and one that “the media jumps in on as well, which is what happened with The Fragile,” Reznor himself commented in an interview from 2002. Of course, he had many reasons to rebuke this. “That’s a record that I was very proud of and am very proud of, and although it sold more than I thought it would, it didn’t sell as many as the record company thought that it would. So it’s a failure. And now that seems to be the poster album for the rock-is-dead commercial failure.”
In fairness, despite what he perceived as sonic mastery, an album packed full of ambient, ornate orchestrations, undercut with electronic tones, before being overcome with hints of his typical industrial rock may never have been destined as an instant victory lap. But you can understand Reznor’s frustration in the virtue of experimentation being misconstrued as out-and-out failure, because surely without that you lose the genesis of what music really means.
It was maybe this that he was hinting towards in his slightly belligerent comments, taking aim at the industry for not holding space for something not so cookie-cutter imitative of his champagne record in The Downward Spiral. Yet it’s true that, despite its opulence, champagne also can make you sick when too much is consumed – it just seemed that Reznor was more aware of this than anyone else around him in the music business, ahead of the game.
