The 1990s rock star Trent Reznor couldn’t stand: “One I had in mind”
It wasn’t going to be easy trying to figure out what was going through the mind of Trent Reznor.
From the moment that he started Nine Inch Nails, a lot of the biggest parts of their discography were about the darker aspects of life, and even if someone wanted to go on that journey with Reznor, there’s a good chance that even the most hardened rock fans weren’t used to the kind of nihilism that Reznor put into an album like The Downward Spiral. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to get the results that he wanted, but there were more than a few times when his friends went a little too over the top with their gimmicks.
Then again, that was the order of the day when looking at the hard rock scene. Grunge had flipped everything on its head in the early 1990s, and even though Reznor was used to sticking to the industrial rock world when making some of his classics, there were also bands that were trying to make their entire career about their inflated ego rather than the actual music whenever they performed live.
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Fred Durst was looking to make something that was a bit more juvenile than everything else, and the rest of the nu-metal world wasn’t that much better for Reznor. He liked the idea of someone getting music that was a lot heavier back on the charts, but for every great band like Linkin Park, there were others like Limp Bizkit and Staind that came off like a bunch of spoiled kids who were whining and complaining about absolutely nothing.
Meanwhile, Reznor was on the other side of the spectrum, talking about his own issues, and yet someone like Marilyn Manson seemed to occupy his own space. Whereas Reznor was channelling his own pain on a lot of his songs, Manson seemed like the type who was actively trying to provoke at every single turn. He wanted to be the Alice Cooper for his generation in many respects, and while Reznor could co-sign the music, there were more than a few times when he felt like the whole thing was too ridiculous.
And whenever Reznor felt strongly about a certain topic, he did what all great artists do: he wrote a song about it. Even though The Fragile is already a massive undertaking on its own, ‘Starfuckers Inc’ is all about people like Manson who were meant to be a little bit more provocative for the hell of it. It’s pretty clear from the video that people like Courtney Love were also a target for him, but Reznor couldn’t help but throw a few digs at Manson as well.
Despite the fact that Manson appears in the video on his own, Reznor felt that his approach was something that he could never really tolerate, saying, “Oh, when I wrote the song he was definitely one of the people I had in mind. So he called me and said, ‘You know what, I’m fucking sick of people asking if this song is about me, so I’ve got a really cool idea for a video that’ll just fuck with everybody’.”
On paper, it looks like a great move to mess with people’s heads, but Reznor’s honeymoon period with Manson didn’t last very long. Even before Manson was known for the allegations levelled against him, Reznor was already ready to rid himself of that part of his life and try something new, whether that meant diving down the rabbit hole of film soundtracks or making music that was a bit more imaginative than trying to be self-loathing every single time he performed.
So while Antichrist Superstar turned Manson into a household name and made millions of people remember songs like ‘The Beautiful People’, Reznor was going into a much different world. His music needed a broader scope than that kind of nihilism, and he was willing to take a few shots at people like Manson for missing the point of what his art was meant to be. Yes, it was caustic and a bit hard to listen to, but Reznor needed something more than just the shock value.
