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The 100 best musicians: Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails – Essay by David Bowie
When the gods of the cacofony put out a competition all over the city and asked the blanks of Industrial Rock to beat themselves to beat the Noise crown, the little boy with the tuba was probably the last candidate they had in mind. His name was Michael Trent Reznor, also played the saxophone and piano and had learned in early years how to make a mixer. He had produced a tremendous debut album called “Pretty Hate Machine”, which he had to present live for three years due to contractual obligations. It was probably thanks to the remaining melodic fragments that he could make his industrial rock accessible to a mainstream audience and sold over a million copies.
Like Brian Eno in front of him, Reznor unpacked his synthesizer, but immediately threw the operating instructions away. When he produced “The Downward Spiral”, he encouraged his computer to interpret input signals incorrectly-and consequently to spit out haphazard, unhappy sound shards, which constantly cut the listener, if not slitting open. This music, right after the Velvet Underground, is the best medium in rock music to whip his soul to your heart’s content.
Years ago I had a strange dream: Lou Reed, I and a friend named Warren Peace sat together for dinner in the Greenwich Village, in one of the long -disappeared restaurants in which Jackson Pollock used to fight with other painters. Our dinner was served by a member of the collapsing new buildings. After a while I realized that the speakers came from the speakers that seemed strangely familiar to me, which I could not classify for my anger.
Birthday surprise for Lou
Blixa Bargeld, our waiter, leaned closer to my ear and whispered: “The music is a birthday surprise for Lou. Trent Reznor has, metal Music ‘specially mixed for Lou.”
And while he said that, splashes and blobs flew us from one of Pollock’s pictures. The music grew louder, and more and more color drops shot through the air – until we fled the café, hunted by disgusting purple, blue and black snakes, which also spread out of infernal screams. And with that everything is actually said about Trent’s music.