The hard rock album David Bowie called “soul-lashing”
David Bowie was renowned for his ability to inhabit diverse characters throughout his career, from the otherworldly Ziggy Stardust to the unsettling Thin White Duke. His immersive approach to music led some to question his moral character due to the darkness of his personas. Despite his own ventures into the darker realms of rock, Bowie acknowledged Nine Inch Nails’ album The Downward Spiral as truly disturbed, recognising its unsettling nature.
Then again, Bowie was never afraid of bringing some disturbing songs into his own repertoire. Since this is the same man who said that he was afraid that the occult wanted to steal his bodily fluids to be used for sacrifices, it’s safe to say that ‘The Starman’ had more than his fair share of run-ins with the darker side of life.
While many of Bowie’s glam fans may have appreciated his Berlin period from a distance, Trent Reznor was defining his music taste when he heard the album Low for the first time. Giving birth to the sounds of post-rock, Bowie and producer Brian Eno captured a chilling atmosphere on the back half of the record, being dominated by the kind of clinical instrumentals that make people’s hairs stand on end.
When Reznor understood how to put his own melodies together, though, Low would become his blueprint for the first projects of Nine Inch Nails. Looking to create an ambient sense of dread, Pretty Hate Machine was the first time that Reznor put all of his disturbing ideas under one roof, playing most of the album by himself.
Compared to the other industrial music coming out at the time, there was still a sense of musicality in what Reznor did. Sure, he was talking about concepts like pain and revenge and severe depression, but there was always a little bit of melody that made songs like ‘Head Like a Hole’ dominate rock radio.
Once Reznor started to play up his image as a rock star, he realised that he was more alone than he ever thought he’d be. Isolating himself even more for the EP Broken, The Downward Spiral saw the frontman take a page out of Bowie’s playbook by inhabiting a character known as Mr Self Destruct, who spends the entire album nullifying his life before succumbing to his demons in the final half of the record.
Even though Bowie had been constantly evolving since his Berlin period, he could appreciate the lengths that Reznor was willing to go on the album, telling Rolling Stone, “In making The Downward Spiral, he encouraged the computer to misconstrue input, willed it to spew out bloated, misshapen shards of sound that pierced and lacerated the listener…second to the Velvet Underground, there has never been better soul-lashing in rock”.
While Bowie had been hard at work shaping his sound on Outside, he was convinced that industrial was the next logical step for him, working with Reznor on the album Earthling and even performing the song ‘Hurt’ whenever the pair performed live. Anyone of Bowie’s stature probably stopped caring about evolving a decade into their career, but in Reznor, Bowie saw another visionary looking to push music further than where it had been before.
