senor miguel, your english is quite good, and senor pelligro…so is yours.
(my english, on the other hand, gets spotty when talking about bands and music…guess it’s a carpal tunnel type thing.)
LIGHTEN UP.
why the hell do we visit this site. it’s to inform and exchange ideas and maybe be funny when we can. that’s life, man.
once again, ed nobel prize for philosophy. call the swedes…c’mon. somebody get them on the case!
“Also quite amazed at the amount of respect for NIN on this board”
I’m not.
Trent Reznor makes catchy, accessible pop that has both musical and aesthetic connections to the cluster of musical acts that people are into on this board (whatever name you want to, or don’t want to put on said cluster).
I think of Nine Inch Nails as a pop act that draws from some more interesting elements, which is admirable, rather than a more interesting act that has fallen into the realm of pop (less admirable, but that’s only my opinion).
Bowie did a good job of summing up people’s disapointment with the pop aspects of what he did after he went all “high art” with the Berlin trilogy (some of my favorite music ever). He said that he was not a “high art guy” who fell down into the gutter of pop, but was in fact a “gutter guy” who pulled some high art things down into the gutter of pop with him. (he put it much better than I am recalling it).
As for my own opinion on Nine Inch nails, I think that the run from Broken through to the Fragile was their best. I really dug the Fragile but thought with teeth was horrible. It’s too much of a Paul Mccartney paint-by-numbers, crafted affair for me. And in my opinion has the worst drums on any record I’ve heard (boring, totally flat soulless performances, which is really funny because the big thing was that they were all live rather than programmed). Ghosts, Year Zero, and The Slip were all big improvements from With Teeth. I like each of them.
I like a lot of stuff that is not pop music, but this is how I like my pop music to sound when I do listen to it. Bowie is the other example of course, although he is (in my opinion) miles beyond Reznor (but then I am perhaps too much of a bowie fan to judge objectively).
NIN
too me I think Pretty Hate was the best because I really dug his lyrics. they didn’t sound petty or emo. They sounded like the pain of some guy that had been jilted out of love so bad that he had some really raw emotion to let out, and the anger in the music perfectly complemented his lyrics.
In short, it seemed genuine… Shortly after, I found out that whole album was written because he had foud his Finacee in bed with his best friend. What a day? Lose your “best friend” and your Fiancee in one fell swoop!
the two best songs on that whole album are “Terrible Lie” and “Something I Can Never Have” both perfectly lay out the pain and anger of his situation.
Everything after PHM seemed contrived and not genuine… Specifically Downword spiral… THe music is angry but the lyrics are contrived and he’s trying to write anger and pain Specifically the song “Hurt” love the music hate the lyrics! the whole album just smacks of “look how angry I am!!!” where PHM is just "this is how I feel!
just my two cents
Late,
grmpysmrf
I dug his lyrics on that record because they had this snide kinda feeling to 'em. “Head Like a Hole,” when you filter out all the poetic nonsense, simply says “HAH, you’re a bitch, fuck you.” I like it.
That, combined with how the record sounds sonically (poppy and danceable, as opposed to the harsher stuff on “Broken” and the whiny stuff on “TDS”), cements “Pretty Hate Machine” as the only NIN release I can really get into.
Though, grmpy, I was previously ignorant of that little piece of history… and it makes me like PHM even more. Mad respect! [cool]
And how could you forget the kick-assness of “Ringfinger”?