Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) Read Online Free Page B
Author: Daphne Carr
purpose of sounding human. The trick of Nine Inch Nails is to make synth-pop sound like hard rock through gesture, distortion, and banks of noise.
But in the
Hate Machine
era, the music was still pretty synth and pretty pop.
Future Industries
Trent Reznor grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, a town on the periphery of the Rust Belt. As Trent headed to college, the majority of the 1983 graduating class of Mercer Area Jr/Sr High School went to work in nearby Sharon’s many steel mills. Within four years, the mills were closed.
Reznor enrolled at Allegheny College, a small liberal arts school north of Mercer, and began coursework in computer programming. The IBM PC had been introduced two years prior, and computer science departments were just getting started in the country. Smaller schools like Reznor’s focused on practical job training in programming languages and math fundamentals. More interested in programming instruments than crunching formulas, Reznor dropped out of Allegheny after a year. By that time, he’d already met a girl, played in the band Option 30, and lived among a crop of passionate tech nerds. He wasn’t going home again.
And because of this—his deep, early, and fervent embrace of computer technologies and single-minded drive to use them in music—Reznor would escape the wrath that microprocessing brought on the rest of his graduating class. While ultimately it was the managers, not the technologies themselves, who made huge numbers of workers redundantin the 1970s, the steel industry’s rapidly changing technologies were one of the major contributing factors of the deindustrialization that decimated midwestern industry. With microprocessor-controlled systems, different products could be made on the same assembly floor by reconfiguring the program.
Flexibility
became the key target for factories. At new plants, preferably for management in nonunion towns, there were more machines and fewer workers. A walk through Mercer today shows a town still struggling to make sense of life after the closure of the mills.
And the factory was just one place where microprocessors changed everything. While guitars and basses had been electrified since the 1930s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that electronic keyboards became part of the ensemble for most working musicians. Prior to that, there was only one price for analog keyboards—expensive—and that hurdle, along with the machines’ considerable weight and difficulty in programming, meant that only a few musicians could use them. However, the keyboard industry of the 1970s and 1980s piggybacked off the innovations of the computer industry, which lowered the cost of research and development for new instruments. Expanded microprocessing capabilities allowed designers to make synths with more and more features, going from mono- to polyphonic, then adding tone-bank memory and, finally, samplers. In the years between 1983 and 1988, digital synthesizers with better usability, options, and prices flooded the market. A generation of musicians jumped at the chance to play these new, affordable instruments.
When Reznor spoke of his DIY awakening in an interview with
Spin
magazine in 1996, he didn’t recall expressing an interest in the punk sound or community. Instead, his ideal was the independence from community afforded by the use of synths. He described this feeling as “the excitement ofhearing a Human League track and thinking, “That’s all machines; there’s no drummer. That was my calling. It wasn’t the Sex Pistols.” 18
After dropping out of college in 1984, Trent moved to Ohio City, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Cleveland. The area had suffered intense disinvestment but was on an upswing because of the restoration of historic homes. He and fellow musician Tom Lash lived across the street from Saint Ignatius High School, a Jesuit preparatory school that anchored the neighborhood. With an armload of keyboards, obvious talent, and a working knowledge
But in the
Hate Machine
era, the music was still pretty synth and pretty pop.
Future Industries
Trent Reznor grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, a town on the periphery of the Rust Belt. As Trent headed to college, the majority of the 1983 graduating class of Mercer Area Jr/Sr High School went to work in nearby Sharon’s many steel mills. Within four years, the mills were closed.
Reznor enrolled at Allegheny College, a small liberal arts school north of Mercer, and began coursework in computer programming. The IBM PC had been introduced two years prior, and computer science departments were just getting started in the country. Smaller schools like Reznor’s focused on practical job training in programming languages and math fundamentals. More interested in programming instruments than crunching formulas, Reznor dropped out of Allegheny after a year. By that time, he’d already met a girl, played in the band Option 30, and lived among a crop of passionate tech nerds. He wasn’t going home again.
And because of this—his deep, early, and fervent embrace of computer technologies and single-minded drive to use them in music—Reznor would escape the wrath that microprocessing brought on the rest of his graduating class. While ultimately it was the managers, not the technologies themselves, who made huge numbers of workers redundantin the 1970s, the steel industry’s rapidly changing technologies were one of the major contributing factors of the deindustrialization that decimated midwestern industry. With microprocessor-controlled systems, different products could be made on the same assembly floor by reconfiguring the program.
Flexibility
became the key target for factories. At new plants, preferably for management in nonunion towns, there were more machines and fewer workers. A walk through Mercer today shows a town still struggling to make sense of life after the closure of the mills.
And the factory was just one place where microprocessors changed everything. While guitars and basses had been electrified since the 1930s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that electronic keyboards became part of the ensemble for most working musicians. Prior to that, there was only one price for analog keyboards—expensive—and that hurdle, along with the machines’ considerable weight and difficulty in programming, meant that only a few musicians could use them. However, the keyboard industry of the 1970s and 1980s piggybacked off the innovations of the computer industry, which lowered the cost of research and development for new instruments. Expanded microprocessing capabilities allowed designers to make synths with more and more features, going from mono- to polyphonic, then adding tone-bank memory and, finally, samplers. In the years between 1983 and 1988, digital synthesizers with better usability, options, and prices flooded the market. A generation of musicians jumped at the chance to play these new, affordable instruments.
When Reznor spoke of his DIY awakening in an interview with
Spin
magazine in 1996, he didn’t recall expressing an interest in the punk sound or community. Instead, his ideal was the independence from community afforded by the use of synths. He described this feeling as “the excitement ofhearing a Human League track and thinking, “That’s all machines; there’s no drummer. That was my calling. It wasn’t the Sex Pistols.” 18
After dropping out of college in 1984, Trent moved to Ohio City, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Cleveland. The area had suffered intense disinvestment but was on an upswing because of the restoration of historic homes. He and fellow musician Tom Lash lived across the street from Saint Ignatius High School, a Jesuit preparatory school that anchored the neighborhood. With an armload of keyboards, obvious talent, and a working knowledge
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