How Kiss embodied pure “evil”, according to Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor always felt himself drawn to the darker side of rock and roll.
No one goes to a Nine Inch Nails album expecting to be blown away by the raw beauty of the catchy tunes, and anyone not ready isn’t going to leave without a few scars. But one of Reznor’s scariest musical loves turned out to be a lot less menacing when you look past all of the macabre makeup and devilish details.
Then again, not everything that Reznor did was about peeling skin from bone, either. Anyone can make a record that’s nothing but a massive cry of anger, but even on The Downward Spiral, songs like ‘A Warm Place’ were always there to provide a bit of ease in between songs about ‘Mr Self Destruct’ wanting to end his life. But for any other shock rock band, subtlety was never a part of their vocabulary.
While Reznor was more song-focused, it’s not like he didn’t borrow from a few of the shock rock acts that came before him. The light show in the early days felt like it was ripped out of a Depeche Mode show, and when he opened his mouth, a handful of songs did have the same kind of grit that one would expect out of someone like Alice Cooper.
Anyone can try to wow the audience like no one else has done before, but all of them are going to be copying Kiss, even if they don’t realise it. None of the band members claimed to be the greatest musicians in the world, but when looking at the stage show, no one could deny that they put everything into their concerts, whether that was Gene Simmons breathing fire or Paul Stanley strutting up and down the stage like a comic-book take on Mick Jagger.
They seemed like every kid’s dream when they first debuted, but there were always going to be concerned parents worried about the ethics of everything. Simmons may have simply been a musician up there onstage whenever he started singing ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’, but given his demonic stage makeup, elongated tongue and blood-spitting, it didn’t take long before a few religious fanatics were convinced that their kids were going to Hell for following them.
But as far as Reznor was concerned, all of that blood and terrifying imagery was all real when he was studying to be a proper musician, saying, “I studied trumpet and saxophone a little bit. It got to the point where my teacher was like, you can be a concert pianist. But the last thing I wanted to hear at 15 is, well, you’re not fitting in now, how about dropping out of school, studying all the time and becoming a concert pianist? Even earlier, Kiss had changed my world. It seemed evil and scary-the embodiment of rebelliousness when you’re age 12.”
However, there’s a strange thing that happens once everyone grows up. While there are still plenty members of the Kiss Army alive and well to this day, some of the lyrics tend to age like milk, either the songs that are a lot less menacing like ‘God of Thunder’ or tunes that make you genuinely worried about Simmons’s relationship with underage girls like ‘Goin’ Blind’ and ‘Christine Sixteen’.
Even if it seemed scary back in the day, Reznor was simply looking to do for kids what Kiss had done to him. Everything looked like a spectacle whenever Nine Inch Nails played in the 1990s, but Reznor was looking to combine the spectacle he saw in Kiss with the raw vulnerability that came out of someone like Robert Smith.
