Recently, I've been digging back into the music that formed me when I was wee, though it never really goes out of rotation. One of the albums I listened to over and over in my earliest years was "Pretty Hate Machine", by Nine Inch Nails. This album, not unlike many early Cure albums, is a work of art in production I appreciate more every year.
Even now, when I listen to PHM, I recall lying on my stacked bedroom mattresses with the lights off, trying to sleep. I'd taken some acid. A girl who was about 12 was staying the night at my house. Her name was Catherine and she hung out with the downtown park kids and I, drinking wine, smoking pot, talking about music. She wouldn't shut up, it was her first time. I'd done it enough times that there was no thrill for me, most trips were not very intense. I couldn't have been more than 14 years old. I put on PHM and told her to tune into it and be quiet. I drifted off listening to, "I am justified I am purified I am sanctified..."
I remember driving around with older friends, listening to "Kinda I Want to" and "Ringfinger." Anyone who liked NIN was an automatic friend. Growing up Mormon, the lyrics struck me. This idea of temptation, doing something even though you're not supposed to. I reveled in it, felt a kinship with the protaganist. "Blast this," I am sure I said to the older teenagers driving me around.
My friends were hippies, but I had an affinity for all things dark and twisted. The album satiated my inner need for creepiness and complexity. I couldn't relate to the Grateful Dead, the band many of my older friends were obsessed with, though I tried. Twisted reflections: These I could relate to. "I know it's not the good thing, and I know it's not the right thing. Kinda I want to..."
Today, I was listening to PHM while taking a nap on the couch at work and it all washed over me. My older friend, Kim, who was a 5' 11" bombshell, had just moved to my city in the Bay Area from Texas. We became fast friends for a spell before she got into boys -- they were wild about her, giving her free speed and coke. Soon, I'd lost her, she was shipped back home to her dad's in the Lone Star State. But before she disappeared, in her immaculately sparse clean bedroom the size of my living room, we would watch the VHS tape she had for Broken. It felt so wrong, but so right to watch a man being shredded by a meat grinder OF HIS OWN VOLITION. It seemed there was nothing like this ANYWHERE. While our hippie friends were shouting peace love, beating a decades dead horse, glittering up for Grateful Dead shows, we listened to Broken and felt the pull of a subterranean darkness we knew we were a part of, a world that was waiting to get us. A world we could outwit by getting ourselves first: "I'd rather die than give you control."
Listening to it made me feel I wasn't alone, that even though relationships with god and fellow mankind were fraught with peril, I could still love. Then, when all else failed, I could go into my darkness and sing about it. Redemption came from deep scars, which I already had at that age.
The transitions throughout the album, how one song bleeds into the next, each taking you down a spiral staircase to a deeper lair... the sparseness of the album coupled with intricate layering of just the right elements. Samples, echoes, grit, shadows on the wall. Hollow moans, clenched teeth.
I can go back to PHM any time and remember it like the first time.
Oh, that first time.
Yes.
ReplyDelete