Epsiode: 190 Nine Inch Nails

VHF-190 (Nine Inch Nails - Cleveland Rocks!) manages to sample a track from nearly every single Halo release in the band’s phenomenally successful career. 

If you weren’t there you might not realize that their debut single Down In It announced it’s get go to the dancefoor right away. Freaks and dead enders, goths, cheerleaders and industrial hard cores, even metal dudes found something to like on the very first album and accompanying singles. Vinyl was still quite popular in 1989. Teenage angst dissipates with some audio scream psycho therapy. Coming down is hard in a drug hysteria fueled dance of near death mayhem. 

Nine Inch Nails started out opening for horror movie synth psychos Skinny Puppy. Trent wrote Down In It as his own version of Puppy’s dark dirge Dig It. Complete with fishnet, big ass Doc Martens and guyliner, perhaps a little white powder to liven up the mood. Did we mention MTV picked up on the antisocial sexually ambiguous pretty boys first album, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine? 

With a couple cool music videos out when such things still mattered, main man Trent Reznor made quite a splash with his glitchy voodoo angst diatribe set to pulsating rhythms. His musical hero Robert Smith alluded to his own animalistic urges but Trent spelt it out in uncertain terms. That’s right, he wanted to fuck you like an animal. What, exactly could go wrong? 

Perhaps another bit of white powder to liven up your mood?

Nearly every release by Nine Inch Nails proper gets their moment in this week’s episode of Very High Frequencies. Remixes, hits, deep cuts and movie soundtrack one offs show the incredible range Mr. Reznor has displayed over the decades. 

Flash forward  past rehabs. Can he still make music people like? Still fresh, still cutting edge. Family man, now long clean and sober, the goddamn rock and roll Robert Downey Jr. Trent beat the odds and did not follow Kurt and the other ghost rock casualties. 

These days he may be more known for his hugely successful career with musical partner Atticus Ross, making award winning Hollywood movie soundtracks and scores. We will save that part of Trent’s career for another VHF so that we can fully focus on a slice of alternative music’s output over nearly every Halo release. 

In conclusion, we stipulate that yes, thanks to musicians like Trent Reznor we can say with confidence that Cleveland does indeed rock. Let’s hear it for Nine Inch Nails! They’re good!