Michael's Number Ones: "The Hand That Feeds" by Nine Inch Nails

DATE	WEEKS
April 30, 2005	2

If you're on the outside looking in, industrial music can seem kinda intimidating. It's aggressive and fast-paced. The bands within the genre have names like Cabaret Voltaire, Alien Sex Fiend, and Revolting Cocks. Their music was never meant to be played on the radio. About the only place you might hear these songs in the wild would be in nightclubs with punishing strobe lights and copious amounts of ecstasy.

Nine Inch Nails probably should've had a similar fate, but they had a couple things going for them. They came along right before the success of Nirvana meant that any music that could credibly be labeled as "alternative" would get a serious push from record labels. And they had Trent Renzor at the center. I don't think it's hyperbole to call Trent Renzor one of the best songwriters ever. He's made songs that touch upon the darkest of themes and feel like their lifted from someone's brain at their absolute lowest moments. But those songs are fucking bangers. No one's ever made misery sound more catchy.

By 2005, Nine Inch Nails probably seemed like they were on their way to becoming 90s nostalgia bait. At that point, they were probably best known for providing the song that effectively became the farewell message of a country music titan. But with 2005's With Teeth, Renzor showed that he still had a lot left in the tank. The first single from that album shows Renzor at the peak of his powers. It's angry, cold, and intense, and you'll want to get up and dance whenever you hear it.

Cleveland is probably the only place in the country that could've produced Nine Inch Nails. It was a manufacturing boomtown that had a sudden and swift downturn, symbolized by the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969. It's given us the Cleveland Browns, probably the only NFL team with a more miserable fan base than the New York Jets. Michael Trent Renzor was actually born in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1965, closer to Pittsburgh than Cleveland. His parents divorced when he was six and he went to live with his maternal grandparents afterward. He became passionate about music after attending an Eagles concert in 1976 and learned how to play the piano.

Renzor spoke about how isolating and unambitious the town he grew up in was, getting all of his culture from TV and magazines. Cleveland wouldn't have been the first destination I'd choose to try and escape that life, but it was probably a lot more affordable than New York. And in any event, it worked out for him. He formed three different short-lived new wave bands between 1985 and 1989, one of which got a small role in the 1987 film Light of Day. When Renzor decided to form Nine Inch Nails, he couldn't find anyone else to play the songs the way he envisioned them, so he played every instrument himself. Until recently, that's pretty much been the way the Nine Inch Nails project has worked.

Reznor was working at Right Track Studios in Cleveland, and used any free time he could find at the studio to work on demos for NIN's debut album Pretty Hate Machine. Reznor played all the instruments and sequenced the tracks himself. Renzor wound up signing with TVT Records, a label that was founded to release compilations of television theme songs. But he got to work with some big deal producers like Flood and Keith LeBlanc, and the album was released in October 1989.

Pretty Hate Machine falls somewhat in line with much of the industrial music that was out around the time, but it also didn't sound out of place against alternative stalwarts like Depeche Mode or Peter Murphy. That enabled two tracks from the album, "Head Like a Hole" and "Down In It", to make the lower half of Billboard's Modern Rock chart. They were also bizarrely booked on Dance Party USA, an American Bandstand-esque show that USA Network produced in the late 80s. Seeing Reznor and the band lip sync "Down In It" is honestly quite hilarious.

More importantly for NIN, they were one of the acts on Perry Ferrell's inaugural Lollapalooza Tour in 1991. NIN shared a bill with Siouxsie & the Banshees, Living Colour, Ice-T, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band, and Ferrell's band Jane's Addiction. It doesn't feel remarkable anymore to see the stacked lineups festivals come up with anymore, but seeing all of those acts for the price of one ticket must have felt impossible to anyone who had the privilege of going to one of the shows. (Jane's Addiction's only top 40 hit on my chart, 2003's "Just Because", peaked at #40.)

Renzor began feuding with TVT over their marketing of Nine Inch Nails as a mainstream band and wound up signing with Interscope Records. He bought the Los Angeles house where the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate and four others to record their next album. Before they began work on it, they released the EP Broken, an angry, propulsive record that signaled the darker direction Renzor wanted to take Nine Inch Nails.

Over four years elapsed between Nine Inch Nails' first and second albums, and in that time, the music landscape endured a seismic shift. Nirvana and grunge music ascended into the mainstream, and alternative rock could get a serious run on MTV and radio. The Downward Spiral was an immediate success, debuting at #2 and going on to be certified four times platinum. It's probably my favorite NIN album. It's dark, textured, and propulsive; Reznor sounds like he's shooting venom directly into your ears the whole time. And it's the record that gave us "Closer".

(Fair warning: the video embedded is the unedited version, so it's decidedly NSFW.)

"Closer" should have been a #1 pop hit. It's a brilliantly written and performed song. But when your song talks about degradation and penetration, with lines like, "I wanna fuck you like an animal", well, I guess radio stations that play in dentists' waiting rooms might get turned off by that. It still became the band's biggest hit, reaching #41 on the Hot 100, despite only getting to #11 on the Modern Rock chart.

But if "Closer" is remembered for anything, it's Mark Romanek's amazing, steampunk-adjacent music video. It's grisly and disturbing, using grainy, yellow-tinted color film. Among the images you encounter are Victorian medical drawings of female anatomy, a monkey tied to a cross (the monkey was not harmed and an ASPCA representative was present during filming), and Reznor in leather BDSM clothing. In order for the video to get play on MTV, the frames depicting anything beyond the pale for broadcast were replaced by "Scene Missing" cards, and whenever Renzor says "fuck" the frame pauses. I first saw the unedited version when I was around 15 or 16 and it felt very transgressive to see it, like I had found an instruction manual for building an nuclear weapon.

After The Downward Spiral's album cycle, Reznor again took his time making a follow-up. He worked on his first movie soundtrack during this time, for David Lynch's Lost Highway; that album produced the pretty awesome single "The Perfect Drug". But the album everyone wanted to hear was 1999's The Fragile. It became NIN's first #1 album, but didn't move nearly as many copies as The Downward Spiral. A physical single was released for the song "The Day the World Went Away", which allowed it to debut at #17 on the Hot 100 and become NIN's biggest pop hit to date. But it didn't produce any top 10 song on the Modern Rock chart, and overall the album seemed like a disappointment.

Nine Inch Nails could've started down a path of irrelevance after The Fragile. The band was already being irrationally blamed by conservatives for causing the Columbine High School massacre earlier in 1999. Reznor was also abusing drugs and alcohol during this time, though he was able to complete rehab and become sober a few years later. The biggest thing keeping the band alive in pop culture actually had no involvement from Reznor whatsoever.

In 2002, Johnny Cash released American IV: The Man Comes Around, his last in a series a covers albums that he collaborated with Rick Rubin on. Among the tracks he covered was the punishingly great The Downward Spiral single "Hurt". Accompanying the song was a stark video, also directed by Mark Romanek, depicting the 70-year-old Cash in his home as an aged master of his craft confronting his mortality. When I first saw the video, I was stunned by how ravaged Cash looked by the toll of age, with his wife June Carter Cash looking on as if she knows their time together is at its end. Hearing Cash sing the lyrics to "Hurt" only intensifies the memento mori vibe of the video. When Renzor saw the video for Cash's version, he remarked, "that song isn't mine any more". The video got constant airplay on MTV2, enough that the song got to #36 on my top 40 in March 2003. Cash died that September at 71; June actually died four months prior to her husband's death.

So yeah, some heavy shit leading up to Renzor going to work on NIN's fourth album With Teeth. Reznor found that sobriety made his songwriting process a lot easier. His reflection on his addiction and recovery played a great influence on the record. Reznor stated in an interview for Kerrang!: "I took a couple of years off, just to figure out who I was and working out if I wanted to keep doing this or not. I had become a terrible addict; I needed to get my shit together, figure out what had happened."

Another influence on the record was the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush's subsequent War on Terror, which wound up being channeled into "The Hand That Feeds". Nine Inch Nails are not known for overtly political songs, so the lyrics to "The Hand That Feeds" aren't exactly subtle. Renzor observes "You're keeping in step/in the line/got your chin held high and you feel just fine". He wonders if this whole crusade's a charade and behind it all there's a price to be paid. I was wondering that too at the time, and time has pretty much borne out that Reznor was correct.

But I don't really think about the politics of the time when I listen to "The Hand That Feeds", at least not in the same way I do when I hear Green Day's "Holiday". The lyrics are vague enough that Reznor could be questioning any power structure that seems to benefit a select few at the expense of everyone else. When he asks if you'll bite the hand that feeds, he follows it with "Will you chew until it bleeds? Can you get up off your knees? Are you brave enough to see? Do you wanna change it?" Being mad at the injustice around you is only good if you're willing to do whatever it takes to make change permanent. Unfortunately, it's easy to feel powerless as just one person. When you depend on those unjust systems for your livelihood, simply offering criticism can feel like placing your neck under the gallows.

The song is only effective due to Renzor's songwriting. It opens with a propulsive bassline that carries throughout the song. The synths feels punishing as if there's a boot literally pushing down on your neck. Renzor's vocals have an urgency that they probably hadn't had since the Pretty Hate Machine days. Renzor directed the music video alongside Rob Sheridan. It's a performance clip with the band members he recruited for the tour to support the album. But the blue tint and pan-and-scan techniques used in the video give it a sense of unease, throwing the viewer off-balance. It was easily the least shocking video Nine Inch Nails had released to that point, but in no way did that diminish its quality.

"The Hand That Feeds" became Nine Inch Nails' first #1 hit on the Modern Rock chart, something that feels impossible to conceive. It also got to #31 on the Hot 100 on the strength of digital downloads that had recently been incorporated into the chart's methodology. On my chart, it only spent 19 weeks on the top 40, but the band felt very much at home on alternative radio, their songs no less vital than their hits from 10 years earlier.

NIN followed up "The Hand That Feeds" with what might be my favorite track from With Teeth when I listen to it today. "Only" is a funky, concussive electronic track. Renzor wrote it about the conflict between artistic vision and commercial success that he and many other artists go through. There's a sense of paranoia that runs rampant throughout that I love. David Fincher, the director behind Seven and Fight Club, directed the CGI video depicting an executive's minimalist office, complete with toys from Spencer's Gifts like a pinscreen and Newton's Cradle. "Only" only (*sigh*) got to #8 on my chart, but if I ranked every NIN song, there's a decent chance "Only" makes the top 5.

Trent Reznor reminded everyone why Nine Inch Nails had been so successful in the first place on With Teeth. And now that he was sober, his productivity actually started to ramp up. But there was still another single from With Teeth in the offing that made a big impact on me, and on alternative radio overall. We'll see Nine Inch Nails back in this column soon.

EXTRAS

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did the soundtrack for the upcoming film Tron: Ares; one of the songs from it is currently in my top 10. That album is actually a proper Nine Inch Nails album, and Trent and the boys are supporting it with a world tour. Here's some nosebleed footage from their hometown concert in Cleveland last week of the band performing "The Hand That Feeds":

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Bravery's sauntering, goth-adjacent debut single "An Honest Mistake" peaked at #5 behind "The Hand That Feeds". Sometimes I forget I'm still awake. I fuck up and say I love this song out loud.