I think it was 1998 when I purchased the Downward Spiral, ushering in a brief period where I wore all black and combat boots exclusively. Fourteen-year old me thought the aforementioned album was the evilest thing ever (it was recorded in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered, so yeah, that's pretty evil.). This is a nihilist piece of art, a cyborg construction, vocals, guitars, and keyboards manipulated by cold, unfeeling technology into unrecognizable cacophony. Mr. Self-Destruct starts with a repeated gunshot (actually a loop of a man being beaten from the movie THX 1138) that transforms into a drum machine while Reznor sings "I am the voice inside your head and I control you," the end result being a song seemingly designed to appeal to disaffected teenagers. The lyrics might be the stuff you scrawled in notebooks and then buried, but there are a lot of interesting ideas in the music. Take the drum and bass of Piggy, the minimalism supported by Reznor's whispering croon. Closer was the big pop hit (only in the 90's could a song with the chorus "I want to fuck you like an animal" become a pop hit), with its heartbeat drum loop and increasingly layered complexity. There are a few songs that don't hold up like Big Man With A Big Gun, a supposed gangsta rap parody, but most of the material is still great, like A Warm Place, which predicts the instrumental direction Reznor would later explore. Still an album I listen to today, although I usually skip a couple of the more nihilistic tracks, since I don't need any nihilism in my life (no one needs nihilism in their life).
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