The adult film star hidden in Nine Inch Nails’ masterpiece
Nothing that Nine Inch Nails created in their prime was meant to be necessarily kid-friendly.
A lot of the biggest hits that Trent Reznor ever made were about self-destruction, and even when he started to get recognised by the Recording Academy, it’s not like ‘Wish’ is something that any mother wanted their kid to hear when they first started to buy their own music. But even if people could get on board with Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral was the kind of record meant to peel skin from bone the minute that everyone hit PLAY on the very first track.
The entire album is a lengthy journey through some of the most debaucherous things any human being could ever do, and it’s not exactly subtle about it, either. Reznor wanted to leave a trail of destruction in his wake, and even if it did have somewhat of a silver lining when looking back on a song like ‘Hurt’, there’s a good reason why his turning in the album came packaged with an apology.
Because even if you remove all the profanity on the tunes, this would still be pretty much impossible for anyone to market to the chain stores of the world. ‘Closer’ is one of the most disturbing songs about sex that anyone has ever made, but even if you don’t personally approve of the more misogynistic and borderline abusive words that are on the record, you can at least feel his pain and get swept up in the pure intensity of it all when listening to a track like ‘March of the Pigs’.
But if there’s one fly in the ointment, it’s ‘Big Man With a Gun’, complete with a lyric sheet meant to be as offensive as possible. Reznor was already looking to make a mockery of gangsta rap throughout most of the song, and since the entire tune is about a guy trying to sexually abuse the first person that he sees, or he’ll blow their head off, why not end up throwing in a few actual sexual encounters in there for good measure?
Reznor had already gone through the trouble of filling the record out with off-putting samples, but aside from sampling screams from Texas Chainsaw Massacre elsewhere on the album, he also figured it would be better to throw in a handful of actual pornographic sounds as well. Credited as ‘Steakhouse’ in the liner notes, the background noises at the top of the song is taken from a pornstar allegedly having an orgasm, with the sample credited to Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe.
While this is the kind of tune that revels in that kind of sleaziness, though, Reznor was never trying to claim to be that person, either. ‘Mr Self Destruct’ was a character that he was playing throughout the entire album, and even though he takes the listener to some off-putting places, Reznor had no interest in living up to that stereotype when he sang. He wanted to capture that sense of debauchery, but it did end up backfiring more than a little bit.
Not only was the PMRC absolutely furious over the song, but Lee’s fascination with this kind of tune is probably one of the ultimate examples of someone not getting the joke. There are plenty of moments where Reznor was more than happy to live out the life of a drug-addled rock star, but when you look at what Methods of Mayhem turned into, it’s not like Lee was ever trying to hide the fact that he was trying to be more than a little bit sleazy whenever he made one of his crossovers.
While it’s still a mystery as to who the adult film star is on ‘Big Man With A Gun’, it does serve as a perfect example of how far the character in The Downward Spiral had fallen over the course of the album. Half of the songs on there don’t even sound like they want you listening to them, but this is the first time on the record where it felt like the music was genuinely threatening whenever it started.
