The song Trent Reznor intended to screw up: “It can’t be the pop single”
Some bands don’t want the kind of attention that they end up getting. It’s one thing to get respect from fellow musicians and a massive fanbase, but when you have the ear of the mainstream, it gets a lot harder to make something that comes from your soul, knowing that many eyes are on you. Trent Reznor knew that his star was on the rise when making The Downward Spiral, so he went out of his way to make the least commercial single possible on the song ‘Closer’.
But then again, it’s not like Nine Inch Nails were completely left off the dial by the mid-1990s. Their brand of industrial rock may have been a lot different when Pretty Hate Machine was released in the late 1980s, but that genre of aggro rock had started to shift towards the mainstream in the wake of grunge.
While it’s hard to call industrial music an offshoot of grunge, the mutual lack of respect for the commercial side of music was something everyone could normally get down on. Even though there were a lot of people in flannel shirts around that time, you could throw on something like Ministry in between the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of the world and get little complaints from purists.
Pretty Hate Machine was just the beginning, though. For The Downward Spiral, Reznor wanted to dig deep and make the kind of record that had the same feeling of some dark existential horror movie, complete with a storyline that ends with the protagonist ending his own life and wondering if he could have done better. Just the kind of Top 40 material people are looking for, right?
Well, when Reznor actually came to the table with ‘Closer’, it sounded like he actually had a hit on his hands. Especially since the last records recorded for the album had been songs like ‘March of the Pigs’ and ‘Mr Self Destruct’, hearing a song dominated by a dance beat and an actual melody could have had a shot.
That is if it weren’t so vulgar. When talking about the record later, original drummer Chris Vrenna remembered Reznor saying that he wanted to screw up the song as much as possible, saying, “I was like, ‘You know this is probably the most ‘pop song’ that we have. ‘But you totally now ruined it. We’ll never have a hit single because you say, ‘I wanna ‘F’ you like an animal.’ And Trent’s like, ‘I know, I did it on purpose to make sure it can’t be the pop single!’ How do you argue that?”
While some censors refused to play the song or show the video, that didn’t stop it from gaining even more momentum. Despite being the song that implies that a man is going to be doing unspeakable things to the person he’s talking about, it became co-opted by MTV and even became a strip club anthem for a while, which makes about as much sense as Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pools’ showing up in a liquor ad.
Then again, maybe it’s for the best that the song got misunderstood so often. That way, the public would go into this record expecting more dance-fuelled anthems and instead get taken on the musical equivalent of a movie like Seven.
