The classic David Bowie song Trent Reznor was ashamed of: “Me at my worst”
Most artists can spend lifetimes trying to rewrite the past. No matter how many of their records are held up as classics or considered landmark achievements in their discography, there will always be flies in the ointment that no one else seems to notice but you when revisiting them. While Trent Reznor was already out of his mind halfway through the 1990s and continuing down his own spiral, he felt tremendous shame when looking back on his work with David Bowie on ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’.
If there was any artist who carried Reznor through the darkest times of his life, Bowie stood head and shoulders above them all. There had been certain records that helped him through parts of his life, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but Bowie was the epitome of what it meant to move music forward, whether that was embracing the synthetic textures during his Berlin era or just making glitzy dance-rock during Let’s Dance.
For Reznor, though, this was more than just a musical love affair. It was as if Bowie was speaking to him directly every time he heard his albums, and when he put together The Downward Spiral, the track ‘A Warm Place’ took the basis of a song called ‘Crystal Japan’ made during Bowie’s Scary Monsters era and spun it into a lo-fi piece of ambient music.
Like all periods of Bowie’s career, though, he wasn’t going to stay in that lane for much longer, and he knew that working with Reznor would work perfectly for his adaptation of synthetic music. ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ already bore a strong resemblance to industrial rock, so getting Reznor to produce ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ was almost too perfect not to work.
Considering how much he was self-medicating, though, Reznor thought that the tune was half of what it could have been had he stayed clean, saying, “Once I got clean, I felt a tremendous amount of shame of my actions and missed opportunities and the damage that I’ve caused in the past. ‘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. 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.”
If this is what Reznor sounded like on an off day, though, one can only imagine what other material he had in the tank. Since Reznor’s constantly inspired by whatever’s going on, hearing him instinctively follow Bowie’s lead throughout the song feels like a torch-passing moment in some respects, as if the new kid on the block was suddenly turning into a master.
Once the tour got underway, there was a chance that Reznor didn’t need junk in his veins to feel high anymore. No matter how much someone tries to numb the pain whenever they are away from home or feeling down, having Bowie harmonise with Reznor as he’s singing ‘Hurt’ probably had the potential to make him levitate off the ground.
