[HN Gopher] They're Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch...
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They're Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and
Robin Finck (2020)
Author : herbertl
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-03-15 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thewhitereview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thewhitereview.org)
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've only read parts of this so far, but it's pretty
| extraordinary. I'm going to have to commit more time later today
| to read the whole thing.
|
| I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and music in general, but the way
| this is written is a few levels beyond what I think I'm even
| capable of feeling.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I'm always a little confused by people such as this one who loved
| Downward Spiral so much. It was a slide into confusion started in
| Broken, away from the honesty and struggle embodied in Pretty
| Hate Machine. It was the Pinnacle of the band's bowing to the
| commercial market and fall into anger which it didn't recover,
| IMO, from until reaching a more mature pinnacle (at least in
| regard to what I wanted from it and what drew me to it) on With
| Teeth. Right Where It Belongs is one of my all-time favorite
| songs wherein they both challenge the exterior and interior to
| greater truth, greater honesty.
| DanHulton wrote:
| Well, I think they address why they loved it so much in the
| article, hell, before the first section is finished, even.
|
| Music can be many things at once, and you can be touched by
| some of the things it is, even if others don't hit for you.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I can't deny the first section described that. My confusion
| isn't about what the claims are or what surface knowledge
| presents.
|
| As a peer comment noted, an outlet for anger is part of it, a
| starting point, and was useful to me too. My comment is about
| how that album more than others invited me to stay stuck
| there, remain clad and "protected" from my vulnerability.
| Tearing down, destroying, and randomizing are always easier
| than solving, creating, healing, loving, and seeing things
| just/right. More relevant in this context, startups are hard.
| Being useful is work.
|
| The beauty in the brashness of NIN is what I believe starts
| with feeling less alone in your heart and leads to loving
| yourself and spreading that into your ambient surrounds.
|
| As you note, I am sharing what this art is to me. I cannot
| say that must or should be what it is to any other person. I
| still hope that we can be less ashamed and equally vigorous
| with our caring.
| scns wrote:
| > feeling less alone
|
| For me it was The Knife. Making me realize there are other
| people feeling the same way.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDdVVPOcLhM
|
| edit:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UeQLO43a2Y
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPD8Ja64mRU
|
| you might know a cover of this one
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJCE48VnI1o
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Being an angry young man drew me to Downward Spiral, if I'm
| being honest.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I appreciate the admission. I can't deny benefitting from
| that too. More in my response to this comments peer.
| keiferski wrote:
| I always saw TDS as a concept album in the vein of his later,
| more recent soundtracks. It feels more coherently atmospheric
| in ways earlier albums didn't, to me.
|
| With Teeth is actually where I think he went too far into
| "regular rock music" territory, with the result that it sounds
| generic and flat to me.
| kbrisso wrote:
| With Teeth is his first sober album. He wanted the stripped
| back rock feel so it would sound different from the previous.
| TOGoS wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm sort of
| with you, though.
|
| That said, I've come to appreciate The Downward Spiral. But if
| that was Sonic The Hedgehog 2, With Teeth (and parts of Year
| Zero) was Sonic The Hedgehog 3. i.e. the master work that built
| on everything they had learned before they ran out of ideas.
| The Slip is their Sonic and Knuckles, where they start going in
| a different, less-cool direction. Of course this is all very
| much my opinion, man. :)
| RASBR89 wrote:
| Downward Spiral - Sonic 2 The Fragile - Sonic 3
| thesurlydev wrote:
| Great post. I've been a fan of NIN for over 30 years and no other
| band has had such a profound impact on my life. This is saying a
| lot because I've always been heavily into almost all genres. My
| biased opinion is that there's something for everyone somewhere
| in their discography because the music produced has varied quite
| a bit over the years. If you listen to them and like what you
| hear, they just announced a new tour.
| qwertox wrote:
| I should have never listened to NIN, but I have; too much. It
| started with Quake, then a neighbor gifted me a CD of Pretty Hate
| Machine and I followed it with Broken and The Downward Spiral,
| which then was the path I went myself.
| SmashngKbds wrote:
| I've been listening to NIN for 30-something years at this point.
| I will never stop. This article is very well written and while I
| can't identify with everything the author describes a whole lot
| of it lands. I'm really glad I found this on HN today! ...A
| surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| My favourite NiN track, Call Me A Hole:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lm1FL7gWl4
|
| A bit of an aside, but I love this mashup and hope some of you
| will enjoy it as well.
| scns wrote:
| And now for something completely different ;)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S42mc0mcrE
|
| My fave by NiN
| keiferski wrote:
| Trent Reznor really has one of the greatest "maturation"
| processes of a musical artist that I can think of. His more
| recent work on _The Social Network_ and _The Vietnam War_ is such
| a refined, minimalistic version of the specific sound he started
| forming 20+ years earlier. Not all artists manage to mature in
| such an elegant way; many never end up quite matching their
| earlier works, or head into entirely different directions.
|
| Also, a fun random fact: Reznor's uncle, I believe, ran a heating
| or HVAC company in the Pittsburgh area. You can still find the
| occasional industrial device with the REZNOR name on the side.
|
| https://partner.reznorhvac.com/en/as/products/product-unit-h...
| Flipflip79 wrote:
| These are very common in Canada still and anytime I see one I
| point at it and make the same joke "Looks it's Vent Reznor" and
| my girlfriend has never once laughed. Oh well.
| rvense wrote:
| If you keep doing it she's sure to get it eventually.
| fipar wrote:
| "It instilled a belief in me that I still have to this day: that
| any spiritual ailment can be cured by playing music at maximum
| volume in a small, dark room."
|
| This is so true to me but I never thought of putting it to words
| like that. I love music and darkness so much that during some
| especially intense moments in live shows I've been to I close my
| eyes instead of looking at the band.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Temporarily disable visual processing and redirect all the
| available power to audio processing. Very Star Trekish. :)
| dingaling wrote:
| I'll always feel slightly guilty when I look at the box-set of
| "And all that could have been" on my shelf.
|
| I bought it from a second-hand music store years ago and when I
| took it up to the checkout to pay for it ( for it was the days of
| cash ) the cashier looked heartbroken.
|
| "I'd been saving up to buy that," she whimpered.
|
| I bought it anyway.
|
| I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN
| collective...
| roadbuster wrote:
| > I still feel bad, but at least I've opened-up to the HN
| collective...
|
| You won't find absolution here; shame!
| fireburning wrote:
| any idea why they chose 9 inch nails?
|
| kind of crazy coincidence in the recent ethiopian conflict a new
| approach they used was to nail the uterus of women with 9 inch
| nails to make sure entire tribes are reduced in numbers but
| without raising genocide alarms
| decimalenough wrote:
| As in, why the band chose the name? It's a reference to the
| length of the nails that Jesus was supposedly crucified with.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Going through a lot of iterations until one band name "stuck",
| true to his obsessive working ethos in finding the "right"
| sound for his music.
|
| > _L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?
|
| T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names,
| but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it
| the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine
| Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and
| could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal
| meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man
| voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with
| band names._
|
| [0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150813023119/http://www.thenin
| ...
| joeconway wrote:
| I'll take any opportunity I can to recommend this podcast, and
| this episode specifically. If this article resonates with you
| then it is absolutely worth the listen.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-songs-that-explain-...
| dlisboa wrote:
| I've seen the term "hagiography" 8 times in the past three days
| in articles of different topics, having never heard the word
| before. Being that English is my second language, but the one I
| consume the most content in (more than my first), I pay close
| attention to word patterns and have seen the language evolve with
| my own eyes.
|
| But this one is weird. I think it's similar to the LLMs fixation
| with "delve", my guess is people are using AI to suggest
| articles.
| droideqa wrote:
| I don't know if I like NIN, but I love Trent Reznor's
| collaborations with Atticus Ross and I love How to Destroy
| Angels.
| shoo wrote:
| tangent: Inverse Phase's "pretty eight machine"
|
| https://inversephase.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-eight-machine...
|
| > Head Like I/O was the track that got this entire album started.
| I was at Ohayocon 2011 and joking around with Dave, Dirk, and
| Carlson about chiptune covers, and the topic of Nine Inch Nails
| came up. Being a fan, I mentioned that lots of NIN songs would
| lend themselves to chiptunes rather well, and I decided I would
| try to surprise everyone with a little bit of Head Like a Hole.
| In a bout of productivity, I was able to do a rough edit of about
| two minutes of the song in a day, and the surprise was a big
| success. The guys all pushed me to consider doing a Nine Inch
| Nails EP or album.
|
| > I did this track on the Commodore 64 because I got into a
| conversation with Carlson about it first, and I hadn't given the
| C64 enough love. The idea to use more systems for the album
| formed as the idea for the album itself took shape.
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