‘Piggy’: The feud at the centre of Nine Inch Nails
The entire concept of a band usually means relinquishing control every now and again.
Not everyone gets their way on every single song they write, and it’s usually down to people being able to leave their egos at the door and compromise on whatever they need to work on. But when Nine Inch Nails first got started, no one was going to argue with Trent Reznor.
From the first moment Pretty Hate Machine came out, everyone knew that Reznor was the main puzzle piece of the band, and the minute that ‘Head Like a Hole’ came on the radio, people had found a new voice that was unlike anything else they had heard. There was the darkness of a band like Depeche Mode, but there was something heavy and mysterious that came with listening to every single track on the record.
Looking through the rest of the band’s discography, their debut is the one time where it actually feels like a band rather than a project. Reznor was looking to make tunes that could be played live, feeding off a bunch of musicians, and while not every tune was the most thoughtful thing in the world, it was better to get his message across through sheer aggression back in the day than being too wordy.
But Richard Patrick always seemed to be the missing link. He certainly had the songwriting chops to compete with Reznor, but whenever he started working on records with him, Patrick would always be put to the side a little bit. It’s one thing to not get credit on a handful of tracks, but after failing to make ends meet, Reznor went below the belt by telling him to go back to a day job for a little bit.
According to Patrick, Reznor’s insistence on his going back to service work was the final nail in the coffin, saying, “The final straw was Trent goes, ‘Hey, listen, Rich, I know you need some extra cash. Listen. Down at the end of Cielo Drive, there’s a little pizzeria, and they need drivers. So maybe you can go make some extra cash over there’.” Patrick was pissed, to say the least, but if he was going to go out on his own with Filter, he wanted to make sure he had the right songs behind him.
Reznor had already paid no mind to ‘Hey Man Nice Shot’, but when it became one of the biggest industrial hits of the time, the NIN mastermind figured he would play some mind games on the next record. ‘Piggy’ might already look like a typical dissection of ‘Mr Self Destruct’ on The Downward Spiral, but most of the lyrics come from Reznor’s nickname for Patrick while he was still in the group.
Which begs the question: what is Reznor actually getting at when he sings ‘Piggy’? Sure, he might be pissed to find out that one of his friends ended up leaving him for his own group, but since the main line of the tune is ‘Nothing can stop me now’, it could easily be a kiss-off song as well. However, in the context of the story, Reznor being free to do whatever he wants might not be the most moral idea for his protagonist, given that he eventually goes on a violent spree before ending it all.
While the two did eventually patch things up and even performed ‘Hey Man Nice Shot’ together, it’s hard to listen to Patrick’s original version and not hear a lot of pent-up anger there. Both ‘Piggy’ and ‘Hey Man Nice Shot’ may have lyrics that have nothing to do with internal drama, but all it takes is the right kind of performance for someone to get the message.
