[Into The Never] – Nine Inch Nails Book – INTRODUCTION

nine inch nails the downward spiral into the never

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

The Downward Spiral album is Nine Inch Nails’ most consistent, unified piece of music and remains one of the most artistically and culturally significant albums of the 1990s, with an influence that reaches well into the present day. The album expressed the mood and the atmosphere of its time—political, social, and personal—but more importantly it continues to resonate with countless fans and new generations of listeners. Almost in spite of itself, it has become, for many, that rare thing—the album that saved your life.

Into The Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation Of The Downward Spiral

READ – Want to know the story behind Closer?

Released on March 8, 1994, to immediate critical acclaim, Spiral went on to sell over 5 million records in the United States alone. It accomplished this working for and against its fusion of transgressive themes and ideas, such as depression, obsession, addiction, BDSM, violence, atheism, and self-loathing—ideas that remain shocking today, still court controversy, and are, for some, highly offensive, directly challenging societal norms through freedom of expression and confronting middle America with itself, the harsh truths that many would prefer to ignore.

The Downward Spiral explores the depths of one human being’s capacity for pain and suffering in the face of nihilistic self-annihilation, a descent into his own personal hell. This is delivered from the perspective of a narrator persona that both is, and is not, Trent Reznor, and as the album’s chief architect, he would struggle to extricate himself from the spiralling narrative that he created and would ultimately follow.

The spiral model establishes the album’s theme and form, expressing the nature of progressive decline. The narrator strips away layers of artifice, shedding metaphorical skins and personal relationships as an emotional drain to pursue his own splintered and fractured idea of becoming a more empowered individual, but this pushes the worst aspects of his nature to the fore until he is confronted by the end zone of nihilistic meaninglessness, coming to terms with the seeming inevitability of his own self-destruction.

Control is the overarching theme that dominates the narrative, a conflicted exercise of power over the self and the infinite needs of obsession and addiction. The narrator wrestles with and tries to resist the external forces of organized religion, censorship of transgressive sexuality, and the weaponization of masculinity; this would also become manifest in Reznor’s professional conflicts with his record labels as he fought for both commercial independence and creative control.

The album’s great strength is to express and make empathetic this very personal struggle, and it becomes a unique record as both an album of music and a scorched-earth artifact brought back, or recovered, from the brink of the abyss. The album becomes an experience to witness, a spectacle to look upon, with listeners either forced to turn away or compelled to see the record through to the every end.

Trent Reznor’s great musical achievement was to bring the computer and the studio to the fore as instruments in their own right in an era when the technical and creative potential of music production software was still emerging. In his liner notes essay to the 2016 LP reissue of The Downward Spiral, the author John Doran suggests that the album was part of “the end of music,” as it had been previously defined for much of the twentieth century, with Reznor utilizing the amplified noise and selective adaptation of the electric guitar and the sampler, meeting in the middle of the evolutionary musical spectrum. Nine Inch Nails was sonically daring compared to the dominant musical styles of the early 90s, an era caught between pop and grunge hegemony. Spiral was already ahead of the alternative curve; it sounded like the future, and it still does today.

The album is less about electronica, sequencers, and synthesizers, and more about applications of technology to manipulate and subvert our expectations of what music can be. Working closely with his production team of Flood, Alan Moulder, and Sean Beavan, Reznor created ghost-in-the-machine performances, othering sounds to make synthetic music sound organic, and vice versa, for technology to express and make empathetic human experiences of pain and suffering, without crushing the life and soul out of it. The album’s power remains intensely physical: guitars shred, stab, slash, and collide; Reznor yells, screams, whispers out his losing breath; drums are beaten and pounded into static—the literal sound of music breaking down reflecting the album’s self-possessed expressions of decay. NIN became less a band and more a machine for Trent Reznor to make music within.

Reznor applied the classical piano training of his teenage years and his musical arrangement skills to bend, distort, and break the rules of composition, attacking what had become traditional rock orthodoxy, to create something genuinely original and groundbreaking. The album forced a reevaluation of all genres, creating a space beyond the labels of industrial, metal, and synth pop to produce a record that quickly outstripped these narrow definitions and broadened their horizons. Reznor remained keen to stress some debt to industrial music but argued that he simply brought elements of that sound into the mainstream. For many journalists, industrial was just an easy tag, but for Reznor, aspects of that sound became one of many tools.

The Downward Spiral is a record of extremes, often displaying uncompromising sonic brutality: conjoining ecstasy with misery; energy with apathy—demanding to the point of exhaustion. The album was radical in how sharply it shocks and soothes the listener, several times within the same song, speaking the unspeakable through measures of force and restraint, weighing pauses against returning onslaughts, exploiting ambient abstraction of quiet awe and resonant silences to create tension, fear, and dread.

The album was constructed to be listened to as a self-contained whole that Reznor [falsely] claimed had no singles and limited commercial appeal. On first listen, the album can appear monolithic and unapproachable in its density; from its hostile sonic extremes to its challenge of difficult self-knowledge. But as with much difficult art, it requires investment of time and attention and becomes more rewarding over time—a very different beast to the short attention span-grabbing and track-skipping qualities of music today.

RUINER

READ – the hidden story behind the song

Reznor spoke about his intent to create a densely layered album that revealed itself to the listener over time. Comparing this approach to the instant appeal of hit singles like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he said to Chaos Control zine in 1992, “That’s a fucking great song, but I could live another five lifetimes without hearing it again.” Spiral works more like a unified piece of classical music: each song is a movement revisiting and refocusing another aspect of the album, and the endings of tracks overlap and feed into one another. Like Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionism, Reznor produced collages of sound, composing in raw strokes of sound to create a complete non-image, direct but various, that still evokes feeling but remains inexplicable as anything but itself. The poet Patrick David Robertson compares the album to Piranesi’s fantastical prison etchings, at once containing a multitude of perspectives, fourteen different aspects of the same struggle compressed into one singular spectacle—from the misanthropic thrash of “March of the Pigs” to the inverted death disco of “Closer” and the redemptive howl of “Hurt,” all of which would become key singles but still contribute to the wider narrative of the spiral, not simply a collection of music packaged as product veering between killer and filler.

One of Trent Reznor’s key achievements was non-musical. The Downward Spiral was part of a wider shift in 90s alternative music that established a more confessional, and by implication authentic, tone. Anger as a form of dissent increasingly became a dominant theme and helped to break the silence around mental health issues of depression, self-loathing, and suicide. This spoke directly to disenfranchised American youth and resonated with the growing pains of teenage angst in the most open and explicit way since punk’s more vacant nihilism. The Downward Spiral was a subconscious reaction to the prevailing narrative of pop music’s generic positivity and its somatic mass effect that said “everything is fine and well in America.” Spiral went deeper to expose the underlying spiritual issues, both discovering and establishing an audience for music of alienation and existential dread.

For many listeners, working through the record’s spiralling thematic trajectory helped them to articulate their personal emotional struggles, forging a more intimate connection between fan and artist. Reznor’s cathartic scream became theirs, and while it might not offer definite answers, resolution, or even hope as a unifying message, it gave a voice to the voiceless such that they felt less alone in their suffering. One fan, Grant Piercy, said: “I was a lonely teenager coping with depression, sitting in the darkness and listening to the album all the way through, on repeat. The Downward Spiral was my therapy. I could hear something new with every listen, some sample or synth buried deep in the mix.” The album’s offer of emotional exegesis was double-edged: for many it would encourage emotional solidarity, reflection, and perspective, while for others it dredged up and deepened negative feelings that could manifest in destructive behaviours.

Writing in 2008 about the consequences of depthless negative introspection, Twemlow and Fonagy noted: “Nine Inch Nails lyrics offer an example of the beliefs of a segment of our civilized but violent society. The lyrics spiral into degradation, hurting, torture, and humiliation, culminating in a sadomasochistic frenzy of personal destruction resulting in the ultimate erasure of the self.” If the bubblegum alienation rock of Nirvana’s Nevermind and its loud-quiet dynamic of sing-along choruses would be the most prominent alternative album of the 90s, then The Downward Spiral was the album that maintained a deeper and enduring influence on music, art, and culture, having more in common with the challenging visions of self-loathing body horror of Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero. Cobain’s apocalyptically angry slacker pose suggested by the eternal shrug of Nevermind’s title, intended as an ironic dig to wider indifference, was a pose in sharp contrast to his often on-point and liberally right-on interviews. This underlying message was perhaps lost among the millions who bought the record just to sing along.

The Downward Spiral’s individual struggle merges with a focus on bigger, more universal themes, and like a particularly demanding and confrontational artwork, it demands a reaction from the listener. Its unflinching [self] portrait of the narrator, stripped of delusion and artifice, dares the listener to perform the same kind of moral inventory, revealing and confronting us with aspects of ourselves that we would prefer not to see. It presents the struggle of the comfortable to accommodate painful truths into their worldview, and for the disturbed to find comfort and resilience in its expressions of suffering and mental anguish.

The brute honesty and explicitness of the album threatened to tear down the pretence of the established order of assumed civility; its very presence stood out against the hypocrisy and oppressive moral sensibilities of the baby boomer generation. Born in 1965 and raised in the era of the Manson murders, Kent State, Altamont, and Vietnam, Reznor produced work that echoed the violent aftermath of the sixties’ broken promises and failed revolution that would become the diminishing returns of the American dream, which for so many remains forever out of reach. The youth of the 1990s, who would become branded as Generation X, were fueled by a schism between ironic detachment, righteous anger, and a deeper dissatisfaction with the American way of life, knowing that only the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed. In the eyes of the establishment, they stood for nothing but aimless rage, idleness, and liberal entitlement while living under the ongoing mandate of the Reagan-Bush axis that slowly edged America toward a neoliberal consensus that continued to accept, and even to accommodate, a growing culture of violence.

By virtue of the album’s aesthetic challenge, The Downward Spiral and Reznor would become easy targets for censorship. Reznor exposes the natural connections between sex and violence but tempers this with a critique of male chauvinism and misogyny. Far from being just a young, angry white male album, Spiral exposes the oppressive monster of the male gaze and its self-image; songs such as “Closer” subvert the submission/dominance of heteronormative gender roles within sexual politics while pushing for the right to consensual deviance. And with his attack on America’s gun culture, Reznor hoped to shatter the idols of traditional masculinity, displacing rock music’s prevailing mode of stoic machismo, the silence that kills. This made the previous generation of bands—openly chauvinistic and unapologetically exploitative of women—seem less rebellious, instead being representative of culturally ingrained conservative attitudes. Revisited in hindsight of the Incel movement and contemporary friction caused by white male privilege at large, the album can seem both progessive and prescient on issues that remain at the forefront of social debate today.

The Downward Spiral remains the definitive NIN record, and its overbearing legacy has become the standard by which all subsequent releases are judged. While The Fragile is often the fan’s favorite album, many would acknowledge that The Downward Spiral is the greater work of art, and except for his soundtrack work, it remains the record for which Trent Reznor is most well known in popular culture. For many NIN fans, Reznor would never achieve the same extremes of darkened introspection and sonic invention of Spiral, but it was perhaps moving on from The Downward Spiral, and reversing the negative trajectory it had forced upon him, that saved Reznor’s life and freed him up to pursue new creative instead of continually trying to repeat himself.

Reznor once told the Chicago Tribune in 2000: “I’d love it if 20 years from now one of my records is referenced like Talking Heads’ Remain in Light or Bowie’s Low. In the 1970s music was still looked at more as art than as product.” Today, listeners have come to regard The Downward Spiral as something of a holy grail within the band’s discography, and its perennial challenge of grace under pressure remains as emotionally powerful as when it first came out. The Downward Spiral endures as a singular piece of music that continues to reflect the angry, righteous pain of Reznor’s generation. Its power is undeniable, and once heard, it can never be forgotten.

–The above text is an extract from my book, Into The Never: Nine Inch Nails And The Creation Of The Downward Spiral, available online and in bookshops.