A single music video made Trent Reznor rethink his whole career
Once Trent Reznor had wrested full, artistic control of his Nine Inch Nails in the early 1990s, the industrial juggernaut would boast a dazzling litany of music videos enjoying heavy rotation on MTV while also causing the network’s censors serious headaches.
For most, it was Reznor crooning “I wanna fuck you like an animal” on 1994’s squalid ‘Closer’ that fully heralded a new poster boy for the decade’s musical underground and mainstream collision. Draped in hanging carcasses of meat, swivelling pig’s head, healthy dollops of of blasphemous imagery and full-frontal nudity, Nine Inch Nails, for a moment, stepped-up to the mantle of alternative American favourite during grunge’s closing chapter, aided by director Mark Romanek’s grimy, hand-cranked promo.
The video had been an essential arm of Nine Inch Nails’ rise. Building a fearsome reputation for volatile visuals that translated the punishing rock attack, Reznor had already counted ‘Happiness in Slavery’ behind him, the banned video depicting S&M performance artist Bob Flanagan mutilated and ripped apart in a torture chair, spat out via a tube as pureed meat.
While revelling in the notoriety of the faux-snuff Broken movie with Throbbing Gristle‘s Peter Christopherson, Hollywood’s leftfield would eventually queue to offer their services, David Fincher and David Lynch dreaming-up some of Nine Inch Nails’ most acclaimed works.
Just as Reznor steadfast avoided the era’s nu-metal trends like the plague, so too were Nine Inch Nails committed to an aesthetic that eschewed much of what was spun on the day’s Total Request Live. While Limp Bizkit was mugging frat boy rock in the charts, Reznor dropped 1999’s The Fragile, an ambitious art-rock double LP eagerly setting itself well apart from the buffoonish rock climate around him. Taking square aim at the music industry’s bloated celebrity clique, Reznor poured his fraught relationship with protégé Marilyn Manson, and the bad-feeling toward Courtney Love in the aftermath of their brief romantic fling.
Such narked seethe was stirred in The Fragile’s promo-only release ‘Starfuckers, Inc’. Directed by Manson and Robert Hales, the video sees Reznor and a dragged-up ‘Disposable Teens’ singer in a desolate Los Angeles desert eagerly lobbing baseballs at fairground plates of everybody from David Lee Roth to Whitney Houston, as well as his shock rock monster he’d helped create, pushing aside their differences to realise the tongue-in-cheek video.
“It was freezing cold at night with this miserable wind kicking up,” Reznor recollected to Stuff Magazine in 2002. “We were all shivering in our silly outfits, and I was standing watching playback on this monitor. I saw Manson dressed like a drug addict chick.”
He continued: “Then the playback stopped and the tape cut into a D’Angelo video that the crew had shot prior to our shoot. D’Angelo was sitting back in his silk bed with a superhot chick next to him, they were making out, you saw her laughing and he was bullshitting with her. And I was thinking, ‘Where did this all go wrong?’ I could be doing any number of things, and I chose to be making out with Manson in the fucking desert in the middle of the night. Time to reassess”.
It’s hard to pin down exactly which video Reznor’s referencing, but R&B soul singer D’Angelo indeed counts a litany of promos that generally opt for late-night clubs in the company of beautiful women as about as arduous his video schedule ever got, a far cry from Reznor’s dunk in toxic waste for the ‘Deep’ clip a year later.
One has to work to their strengths. Reznor could never have pulled off a video like D’Angelo’s sexually charged ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’, but then perhaps the neo soul star couldn’t depict a fake on-video death and prompt a genuine response from the Chicago Police Department à la ‘Down In It’? The grass is always greener on the other side, and Reznor’s envious wobble thankfully didn’t scupper a chartered course of knock out videos well into Nine Inch Nails’ over 30 years tenure.
