Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) Read Online Free
Author: Daphne Carr
individual who finds loneliness amid the crowd.
So live the contradictions of being a Nine Inch Nails fan. Being in the live crowd was one of the most loaded moments in Nine Inch Nails fandom, when suburban isolation and alienation became mass spectacle. There was a horriblethrill in being among thousands of black-clad people with raised fists singing along. While Trent, his band, the live sound, the light show, and the venues worked to make it a cathartic experience, it was in the performance of individual fans among many that the social distances in daily life collapsed, the asocial gave way. It is through acknowledging the repetition of ourselves and understanding the implications of so much Nine Inch Nails fandom that we become critically conscious people. In the crowd, be it face to face or online, fans could trace similarities, see certain patterns, and talk as community. It is during these moments when Nine Inch Nails fans move from being a trench coat mafia, gazed upon as suspects, to become something like a family.
This book is a written version of that moment. It looks beyond the skin and stigma to the deep tissue of one kind of American despair.
The Becoming
In 1979 Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called “The River,” a story of a teen pregnancy prompting a loveless marriage in which the father works a crummy job whose future is uncertain “on account of the economy.” If you take
Pretty Hate Machine
as the sound of that child’s growing up, then the album is not a harbinger of the technofuture but the continued articulation of dread felt by a certain kind of man given certain chances.
Pretty Hate Machine
arrived in the final year in office for Ronald Reagan, a fiercely antilabor president whose tax incentives made it easy to close American factories and whose trickle-down economics curbed 1970s inflation while crushing the country’s working people. Reagan’s mantra of personal responsibility focused the blame for lost jobs on workers, and his government cut social programs that could help the newly unemployed, including health care, food stamps, and education. This was the playbook of economic neoliberalism, which would come to be a global strategy to redistribute wealth back to elites. 16
Reagan’s policies drove the U.S. into the postindustrial era at an enormous human cost. Industrial music was one poetic response to this trauma, much like country music was earlier in the history of industrialization. Country rose as a genre at the moment when most Americans had left rural areas for cities, as a kind of modern music about rural, social, and temporal distance. It was a way to understand the lost connection to the land, along with the humiliations heaped onto working-class, mostly white folks trying to make a decent living. Country musicians have defined themselves against the urban, cosmopolitan, and technologically modern world through recordings that emphasize acoustic timbres and rough vocal qualities. Lyrics idealize the rural, celebrate the pride of manual labor and integrity of a promise, and lament the singer’s or others’ actions when they fail to live up to an ideal or “sell out” for the modern.
Industrial is a postmodern music about the failures of modernity, a genre begun as an avant-garde practice in 1970s England but which grew into a network of underground scenes in fading western industrial cities by the eighties. The dry irony of Throbbing Gristle’s maxim “Industrial music for industrial people” has been interpreted across the globe with different instruments and musical styles, and with varied lyrical approaches. One thing is constant: industrial musicians embrace the technologies of management, the sounds of the shop floor, and flexible, nonlinear production techniques in their critique of power. Their cut-ups, sputtering drum machines, and shreds of harsh noise are the ugly mirrors of pop music’s technological wonderland, while their lyrics literalize the horror
So live the contradictions of being a Nine Inch Nails fan. Being in the live crowd was one of the most loaded moments in Nine Inch Nails fandom, when suburban isolation and alienation became mass spectacle. There was a horriblethrill in being among thousands of black-clad people with raised fists singing along. While Trent, his band, the live sound, the light show, and the venues worked to make it a cathartic experience, it was in the performance of individual fans among many that the social distances in daily life collapsed, the asocial gave way. It is through acknowledging the repetition of ourselves and understanding the implications of so much Nine Inch Nails fandom that we become critically conscious people. In the crowd, be it face to face or online, fans could trace similarities, see certain patterns, and talk as community. It is during these moments when Nine Inch Nails fans move from being a trench coat mafia, gazed upon as suspects, to become something like a family.
This book is a written version of that moment. It looks beyond the skin and stigma to the deep tissue of one kind of American despair.
The Becoming
In 1979 Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called “The River,” a story of a teen pregnancy prompting a loveless marriage in which the father works a crummy job whose future is uncertain “on account of the economy.” If you take
Pretty Hate Machine
as the sound of that child’s growing up, then the album is not a harbinger of the technofuture but the continued articulation of dread felt by a certain kind of man given certain chances.
Pretty Hate Machine
arrived in the final year in office for Ronald Reagan, a fiercely antilabor president whose tax incentives made it easy to close American factories and whose trickle-down economics curbed 1970s inflation while crushing the country’s working people. Reagan’s mantra of personal responsibility focused the blame for lost jobs on workers, and his government cut social programs that could help the newly unemployed, including health care, food stamps, and education. This was the playbook of economic neoliberalism, which would come to be a global strategy to redistribute wealth back to elites. 16
Reagan’s policies drove the U.S. into the postindustrial era at an enormous human cost. Industrial music was one poetic response to this trauma, much like country music was earlier in the history of industrialization. Country rose as a genre at the moment when most Americans had left rural areas for cities, as a kind of modern music about rural, social, and temporal distance. It was a way to understand the lost connection to the land, along with the humiliations heaped onto working-class, mostly white folks trying to make a decent living. Country musicians have defined themselves against the urban, cosmopolitan, and technologically modern world through recordings that emphasize acoustic timbres and rough vocal qualities. Lyrics idealize the rural, celebrate the pride of manual labor and integrity of a promise, and lament the singer’s or others’ actions when they fail to live up to an ideal or “sell out” for the modern.
Industrial is a postmodern music about the failures of modernity, a genre begun as an avant-garde practice in 1970s England but which grew into a network of underground scenes in fading western industrial cities by the eighties. The dry irony of Throbbing Gristle’s maxim “Industrial music for industrial people” has been interpreted across the globe with different instruments and musical styles, and with varied lyrical approaches. One thing is constant: industrial musicians embrace the technologies of management, the sounds of the shop floor, and flexible, nonlinear production techniques in their critique of power. Their cut-ups, sputtering drum machines, and shreds of harsh noise are the ugly mirrors of pop music’s technological wonderland, while their lyrics literalize the horror
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