Who is sampled on Nine Inch Nails song ‘Closer’?
There was little sonic resemblance between Nine Inch Nails‘ first two albums. While bridged with the Broken EP’s blistering industrial attack, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine was an aggro synthpop debut, soaking up the Wax Trax! Records’ electronic pummel but infinitely more indebted to Depeche Mode’s brooding pop craft than sharing Skinny Puppy’s psychoactive horror trip.
Yet, the likes of Ministry’s cyber-ravaged assault would inform Nine Inch Nails’ 1990s trajectory, swapping overt keyboards for massive guitar assault and a further jump into live shows filled with onstage Yamaha DX-7 destruction and a spike of cathartic chaos.
Finally dropping in March 1994, The Downward Spiral belligerently stood worlds apart from Nine Inch Nails’ debut pop sheen. A conceptual examination of an individual’s misanthropic descent to suicidal oblivion, Reznor coats the band’s sophomore effort with an aural palette of organic textures and weathered ambience, electronic elements slithering in the background skin deep under the dissonant affront.
Such challenging material’s commercial success was a surprise to all involved, no less Reznor, witnessing his bleak industrial rock opera sailing to number two on the Billboard 200.
While led by the furious ‘March of the Pigs’, it is the follow-up single ‘Closer’, which defined Nine Inch Nails for years, a twisted funk number dripping in ugly sex and self-loathing that ‘out-popped’ anything from Pretty Hate Machine yet stayed firmly put in The Downward Spiral‘s abrasive plane. Ingenuously oozing, ‘Closer’ crawls out of the speaker with mutoid groove, gurgling bass, hissing beats, mechanised synths stabs, and a devious slathering of stale lust thrust Reznor straight onto suburban bedroom walls as alternative’s new poster boy, setting the stage nicely for their infamous mud-caked showdown at Woodstock ’94.
Reznor would carry over the subtle use of samples heard on Pretty Hate Machine for The Downward Spiral‘s grab bag of sonic flavours. ‘Closer’ features Reznor’s soundsourcing at its most inventive. The opening piston beat is in fact Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’ from 1977’s The Idiot, the original emitted from a primitive Roland drum machine under David Bowie’s production during the fabled Berlin era. Fed through two Akai S1100 samplers, each attached with an expander to quadruple the effect, a heavily modified ‘Nightclubbing’ lurches as ‘Closer’s intro.
Heard faintly in the background at the start but greatly present as ‘Closer’ ends, a thin and swirling warp can be detected while Reznor plays the final piano chords. A less likely springboard than Iggy Pop’s brittle post-punk, but Roxy Music’s ‘Take a Chance With Me’ from 1982’s Avalon is screwed about with at the ‘Le Pig’ studio at Los Angeles’ 10050 Cielo Drive—the location of Sharon Tate’s murder at the hands of The Manson Family. Capturing the track’s ambient shimmer, Reznor reversed it, increased the speed and discovered a new and unsettling ghostly layer to trickle all over his skewed pop hit.
The Downward Spiral would grab from all audio directions, across anthropological field recordings to a plethora of movies, but ‘Closer’s inventive twist of Iggy Pop and Roxy Music stands as no greater expression of fandom than ensuring their work forever churns in Nine Inch Nails’ sonic soup awaiting rediscovery.
