Why ‘The Downward Spiral’ led to Trent Reznor wanting to quit music
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has managed to steer his industrial juggernaut to an impressive endurance with its creative integrity intact.
In their mid-1990s Lollapalooza pomp, Nine Inch Nails were the gothic posterboys, dropping the mammoth-selling The Downward Spiral and seizing American suburbia via MTV’s broadcasting of their mud-caked Woodstock ‘94 show. 30 years later, Reznor leaned into his vintage stature in the alternative rock world, avoiding the pitfalls and silliness that can befall ageing rock stars who can’t let go of the shock schtick once the initial infamy has ebbed.
The fact is, Reznor’s an artist. While never above provocation, quite happy to drop faux-snuff music videos in the film underground and wail “I want to fuck you like an animal” on a Billboard Hot 100 hit, such transgressions always served a central concept in aid of the music.
Consistently connected to his intuitions, an instinct shaped by his lifelong love for David Bowie’s ever-evolving creative chases, Reznor was never going to lapse into protégé Marilyn Manson’s dead-end of cartoon irrelevance. An untethering to inauthenticity was a peril Reznor wavered on during their explosion to stardom, however.
“The Downward Spiral became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Reznor revealed to Kerrang! in 1999. “I wound up distorted – someone I didn’t know”. Playing the gargantuan Self Destruct Tour around the world for two and a half years, the grounded independent scene that surrounded Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine debut soon gave way to the artifice of fame and fortune. “Finishing a long tour for that record, I found myself at a weird place. Everything was different to when I got on that tour bus a few years before – more people kissing your ass and more wanting you to fail.”
Becoming a poster boy was proving to be a curse. Unable to grapple with the disillusionment that followed a US album number two, Reznor kept himself busy co-producing Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, as much an effort to stave off entering the studio for the next Nine Inch Nails LP as helping his Nothing Records labelmate. “I avoided doing a new record because I’d forgotten that I really liked playing and making and listening to music,” he confessed. “All the other shit that’s around it – the good stuff and the bad stuff – clouded the reason I was doing it in the first place.”
He added, “It really came down to me thinking, ‘Do I really want to keep doing this?’ I don’t know anybody who’s just stopped when they were at the height of their career, other than those who killed themselves, which I wasn’t wanting to do.”
Reznor was in his 30s following The Downward Spiral’s explosion. Navigating the same ruminative pangs that strike anyone leaving their 20s behind, coupled with a bout of writer’s block and creeping addiction issues, Reznor was presented with a fork in the road, either deciding he was too alienated to carry on with his Nine Inch Nails day job, or to remind himself why he started the band in the first place and glean the creative purpose amid the bullshit.
He chose the latter. 1999’s double album, The Fragile, would eventually drop to acclaim, and a course would be charted toward Nine Inch Nails’ place in the alternative world as an elder statesman. Future records and glowing collaborations would ultimately owe much to Reznor’s late 1990s personal wrestle, when the trappings of fame nearly threatened to derail Nine Inch Nails’ commitment to the eternal importance of the music.
