![]() ![]() ![]() Eventually, he found his way to the Chicago-based industrial label Wax Trax! and their mainstay act Ministry, who taught him that songs could be hideous and irresistible at the same time.Īfter a fleeting college stint, Reznor dropped out in 1984 and moved to Cleveland, where he briefly suffered the humiliation of playing in a new wave band. As a kid, he latched onto the juvenile antics of shock rock outfits like Alice Cooper and KISS that he saw on TV and suggested that something, somewhere, might be happening. He grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where nothing happened. Like his contemporary Kurt Cobain, Reznor came of age gagging at the pap that slicked MTV, the tired rock bands with aerated hair surfing the last dregs of glam. He wrought a lucrative career from a childhood fascination with music he also seethed about the indignities of Reagan-era capitalist machinery only to find himself its shiniest new cog. The sound of metal chewing meat and actual metal chewing actual meat fused together again.īy the time he recorded Broken, Reznor had gotten everything he’d ever wanted and hated it. They made a natural pair: the scrappy, squalling poster boy for the newly mainstreamed industrial movement and the professional masochist who carried on in the tradition of COUM Transmissions, the violent and depraved performance-art collective that gave rise to Throbbing Gristle, the first band to claim “industrial” as a descriptor for themselves. He was likely best known for nailing the head of his penis to a board in front of a live audience to Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” that’s how Trent Reznor heard of him, anyway. The man fed to the machine is played by Bob Flanagan, a performance and video artist who lived with cystic fibrosis and made gruesomely provocative art from his station inside the late 20th century’s techno-medical apparatus. This is “Happiness in Slavery,” the revolting, hypnotizing, beautiful video that accompanied Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP in 1992. ![]()
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