The album Trent Reznor said was “one of the greatest of all time”
There’s always been a jagged beauty in everything that Trent Reznor does. A lot of Nine Inch Nails’s greatest works might not be the most pleasant thing to listen to, but whenever anyone takes the deep dive through projects like The Downward Spiral or even later projects like Hesitation Marks, it’s easy to see the briefest melodies getting stuck in your head in between the raw pain on the rest of the project. Reznor may have used that paint as a paintbrush more than a few times, but that only comes from getting an education on what that musical sorrow could look like.
That’s not to say Reznor spent his entire life listening to depressing music. Many pieces of his music sound downright Beatlesque from the way he structures his melodies, but all of his favourite artists had the best of both worlds when it comes to emotion. Artists like Brian Eno may have inspired him from a production standpoint, but listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode is what reminded him that sad emotions can be even more gripping than happy ones.
But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know how to get too heavy-handed with it as well. The Downward Spiral is certainly a stroke of a genius and is almost mandatory listening for anyone remotely interested in 1990s music, but if all the heaviest thing that you’ve heard is a little bit of Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses, you shouldn’t be surprised when he takes your head and throws it into an emotional woodchipper.
Then again, since when was rock and roll ever about making people feel comfortable? This was the genre meant to pull heartstrings and fingernails out in equal measure when it wanted to, and while Reznor has claimed to not take any prisoners whenever he’s writing the most obscene music he can, Roger Waters was never a slouch when it came to making something truly off-putting for the sake of art.
Although The Wall represents both the best and worst of what Pink Floyd was about, Reznor always considered it one of the finest pieces of music ever conceived, saying, “The Wall had a great impact on my music and my life. Unfortunately, I do not know Waters personally, but I believe I understand what bugged him when he wrote it. I grew up with this music and it’s still within me. For me, this album is certainly one of the greatest works of all time. It is perfectly composed, played and recorded album that brings extensive emotions.”
When looking at Reznor’s rise to fame, though, it’s hard to think that he didn’t have a few moments when he saw the worst fears of The Wall coming to fruition. If there’s one overlying truth about the album, it’s that fame can take a dangerous toll on someone, and while Reznor didn’t do anything as heinous as turning his show into a fascist exercise, there were bound to be a few scars when he got finished some of his tours.
A lot of that pain could be channelled on the spot when they played live, but Reznor saved many of his lessons for when he made his own records. Beyond the classics, the storylines and overlapping themes that come through on albums like With Teeth or Year Zero are as conceptual as what Waters was doing, to the point where the latter feels like a sci-fi update on what the Floyd frontman had done on his solo works like Amused to Death.
The Wall might not be for everyone and is definitely a heavy listen for people who are used to standard pop-rock tunes, but for anyone even vaguely interested in an immersive musical experience, Reznor wasn’t that off the mark calling it a masterpiece. This was the kind of benchmark that anyone even thinking about making a concept record would have to model themselves after.
