Day 2: Closer to Trent Reznor's tongue

Hello from 1994 and MY GOODNESS this place is teeming with great music. As I write this, I’m listening to an industrial metal playlist constructed by my pal and fellow column contributor, Dylan “Spooky Bones” Charles. The industrial metal genre has faded considerably since its 1990s heyday and may have crested the plateau in 1994 as far as my tastes are concerned. Look, we don’t have to fight about it.

Maybe you’re out of the loop. After all, it’s not the most popular variety of music even within rock and metal circles. The industrial genres take the concept of ‘metal’ comically literal, leading to experimental sounds characterized by power heavy riffs, highly repetitive vocals, machine noises, and what I can only describe as “assembly-line sex percussion.” I’m a fan.

Not the machine kind. I like the music.

Dylan’s playlist consists of eight industrial rock/metal albums released in 1994. We have music from Sister Machine Gun, Malhavoc, Numb, Hate Dept., and Cop Shoot Cop, as well as the more popular sisters of the genre, Stabbing Westward, Nailbomb, and of course, Nine Inch Nails.

It has long puzzled me why music designed to sound like a box factory tour through the ears of someone on an acid trip hits me in the right spot, especially since the music I typically gravitate toward is rooted in the less rigid realm of rhythm and blues. Then there was a period of my life that if a song didn’t include some instrument solo that made me either cry or want to run through a brick wall, I didn’t find it worth listening to. Yet, despite my many phases in and out of different genres on the more organic or string-based spectrum of music, the electronic infused and largely digitally constructed industrial metal stuff has been a consistent pleasure.

“CAN I TAKE YOUR ORDER?!”

Less pleasurable but wholly memorable: Nine Inch Nails’ music video for the hit single “Closer.” If you had a heartbeat in the 90s, then there’s a good chance you’ve seen this video before. It either graced your television screen during a boring summer date with MTV or you’ve seen it blasted on a night club big screen accompanied by a low rent DJ’s shitty remix. The latter is probably less true these days unless you make a point to attend “MILF only” nights or the progressively rare “40 and over get in free” nights. It’s an old song.

The piss soaked “Closer” video is something to behold, that’s for sure. I don’t remember when exactly I saw the video for the first time, it may have been after 1994, but I was only 9 or 10 and was affected down to my flabby little core. I first saw the video while staying at my sister’s place. She, and her husband at the time, had moved into a farmhouse on the other side of town. Looking back now, the idea of my sister or her then-husband committing to farm life is preposterous but at the time it seemed like a hopeful start for the newlyweds. I saw it as an opportunity to get some sinful TV in.

You may recall from my first entry this year, “Day 0”, in 1994 my siblings were estranged from our family for a laundry list of reasons that looking back I can confidently say were bogus. But, when I did eventually visit or stay over at my sister’s place, she would let me watch what my parents wouldn’t. My parents had cable installed around this time but it went to the one TV that I shared with them in a part of the house where sneaking some risqué late night programming was out of the question. That would thankfully change a year or two later but until then I would need to go ‘visit Sissy’ to watch the likes of Beavis & Butthead, MTV in general, and rated-R movies.

“Nope. Can’t see shit in these.”

This constraint meant that when I did get a chance to have my eyes opened to what god-fearing folk were fearing on cable, those images were burned into an area of my mind that’s hard to clean. Thanks to NIN’s aggressively edgey “Closer” video, I am able to remember nearly every detail of the very room in a farmhouse that I only visited, at most, six times in my life. It’s like stumbling upon your first dead body: you never forget it. Oddly, it was my sister and her husband’s bedroom where I first witnessed Trent Reznor scream into the void wearing WWI aviation goggles because that room was along the quickest route to the bathroom when no one was asleep. I’m just saying, I wasn’t in my sister’s bedroom for no good reason.

While traipsing through the empty room where MTV had been left to play music videos for no one in particular, I must have stopped to stare. I spent the next short moments in some sort of religious awakening, a trance of sorts, where my mind left my body to fend for itself while it overdosed on the rapid flow of disconnected, bleak imagery being hurled at it. I can remember seeing Reznor’s tongue a lot. A pig’s head, spinning. And a poor, scared little monkey pretending to be Jesus. Maybe it was forced to be Jesus, actually. I might have known then I was going to be traumatized but I didn’t look away because the music was so dang good. What in the frickin’ heck is this? 

I didn’t process many of the lyrics, I just watched the continued flash of crude depictions and listened to the pulsating throb of what I surmised at the time was a dot matrix printer having sex with a second dot matrix printer slathered with mashed potatoes. My sister showed up just in time to see me standing there gazing onward as Reznor proceeded to wish animal-like copulation on me and then take time to show me the ball gag in his mouth.

“Mmm. Who’s a juicy tomato boy? It’s me. I am.”

“Uh oh. Don’t tell mom I let you see this.”

“Got it.”

I told her I liked the music and she promised she’d buy the tape for me to listen to whenever I came over as long as I kept quiet. “Deal.” She never bought it, but I never told my parents anyway. I needed to keep this relationship intact for future naughty cable viewings.

NIN’s The Downward Spiral remains one of my favorite albums of all time largely due to the slow drip feed way I was introduced to the songs from it. Since I never ended up owning the album it stood a chance to remain fresh for me well beyond when I would typically run it into the ground. I tend to bludgeon myself with most music I discover to love. Instead, I would hear “Mr. Self Destruct” or “Piggy” on the radio months apart from each other and wonder, “Man, who is this? I love it!” only to find that it was music from the same weird video guy and from the same album. It was probably six years later, after we finally got home internet, when I was at last able to devour it whole.