What are the samples on Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Pretty Hate Machine’?
Five years before the blistering guitar attacks and keyboard abuse that scored Nine Inch Nails‘ mud-caked Woodstock 1994 pomp, frontman and creative force Trent Reznor was cooking up infinitely more synthpop-heavy demos during his breaks as an engineer in Cleveland’s Right Track Studio.
While Ministry and Skinny Puppy inspired him to embrace aggression, the material that would be shaped into 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine debut was far more indebted to the likes of Depeche Mode when looking past its industrial affront. While not as obvious as The Land of Rape and Honey‘s hellish collage of news reports or VIVIsectVI‘s swirling horror audio, Pretty Hate Machine is subtler but no less saturated with samples. It’s impossible to glean everything, with Reznor reaching into his record collection and pilfering all manner of snippets with his E-mu Emax sampler and aurally twisting them beyond recognition with Turbosynth and Alchemy software.
Every drum sound heard is a crush of audio elements from anybody across Front 242 to Scritti Politti, equalised and served up as a punchy whip snare or cavernous percussive slam.
“I was tempted to lay in more of other people‘s stuff, but I thought that would lend a real dated quality to the record, seeing where that has gone the way it has in hip-hop,” Reznor revealed to Keyboard in 1990. With this in mind, Pretty Hate Machine is laced with an infinitely more eccentric and intrepid grab bag of music and film sources. Opening ‘Head Like a Hole’s’ backing tribal yelp is lifted from composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe’s capture of the Samburu warriors’ initiation ritual from his 1975 field recording album Africa—Ceremonial & Folk Music.
Nine Inch Nails’ first single ‘Down In It’s’ bass thumping strut reaches into post-punk drummer and On-U Sound collaborator Keith LeBlanc’s Stranger than Fiction from 1989, skewering ‘Mechanical Movements’ and ‘Einstein’s’ mechanised grooves into the massive beat number. LeBlanc lent his production and mixing skills to Pretty Hate Machine for good measure, too. Buried deep in the blasphemous ‘Sanctified’, Brad Davis’ Billy Hayes character from the prison drama, Midnight Express, writes to his parents from the infamous Turkish jail amid the track’s eerie Gregorian chants.
‘Kinda I Want To’ features an unbelievably confounding set of samples. Alongside a hint of Funkadelic’s ‘Good Old Music’, two selections from the 1987 Christmas Rap compilation form key features of Pretty Hate Machine‘s sixth track. The buzzing synth blast is borrowed from Surf MC’s ‘A Surf MC New Year’, and the gritty breakbeat component swiped from Sweet Tee’s ‘Let the Jungle Bells Rock’. That warm, fuzzy, festive feeling you got from spinning ‘Kinda I Want To’, now you know where that’s from.
Warped vocal samples from Beside’s ‘Change the Beat’ breathe its perpetrating snarl all over ‘Sin’—Besides, the moniker of Time Zone’s Ann Boyle. On the other hand, the backing singers on Love and Rockets’ ‘So Alive’ croon on the horny ‘The Only Time’. Lastly, the “Ahhh, Booga Booga!” line that kicks off ‘Ringfinger’s’ hammer synth crescendo is Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, from Nothing’s Shocking‘s ‘Had a Dad’.
Christmas hip-hop and George Clinton may not have been obvious flavours for Nine Inch Nails’ explosive debut, but speak to the inventive artistry of their leftfield frontman.
