Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine

THE REVIEW

Here it is, my diary of mistakes. I've always appreciated Nine Inch Nails, except for a difficult start due to the fact that, well, at fifteen I didn't understand a damn thing.

But one of their albums that I've always struggled to listen to was their debut Pretty Hate Machine. A testosterone-fueled version of Depeche Mode with a brooding American rocker on vocals, that's what it seemed to me. If I wanted to listen to dark synthpop, I'd listen to Depeche Mode, if I wanted to listen to American rockers, I'd listen to, I don't know, Soundgarden, if I wanted to hear someone say God is dead and no one cares, then I'd listen to The Downward Spiral. Or Slayer, who have nothing to do with it but are good on any occasion.

In short, I considered Pretty Hate Machine as just a regular synthpop album with guitars with a slightly abrasive sheen that gives it that beautiful & damned vibe. I started to question my view once I stopped to think about how amusing it was that many detractors of Nine Inch Nails say they dislike them precisely because Trent Reznor did nothing but take cues from previous, more extreme and innovative groups, and reworked them just enough to make them commercial with a dark image aimed at attracting the youth. In short, they consider Pretty Hate Machine a bad industrial album with a slightly pop sheen that makes it appealing to the masses.

To put it succinctly, Trent Reznor would just be a "cunning strategist". I don't want to argue with anyone, but I hate that term (but the blame also lies with the news and their "cunning strategists of the timesheets", oh how I hate it). And I disagree on an essential detail: for me, there are no "cunning musicians", there are only charlatans or people who challenge us because they change the rules. It's the usual debate between stagnation and change, you see? And if we believe that it's not possible to merely copy old stuff and that we cannot expect everyone to only think about playing more extreme and elitist than their predecessors, then I'd say that wrapping other people's ideas in a more palatable package doesn't automatically seem like charlatanism to me, especially if this debt to the past is acknowledged and appreciated.

Now it remains to be said how I realized I was also in the wrong. That is: it is true that Nine Inch Nails was born as a synthpop band with louder sounds (to the curious, I recommend listening to the demo Purest Feeling on YouTube), but it is also true that even at their debut, Trent Reznor had produced something worth listening to even today. And I figured it out by asking myself a very simple question, so simple that I felt like an idiot: what makes Nine Inch Nails' albums special, both the big hits and the less successful ones? Let's be clear: it's neither the voice, nor the composition nor the image. These are things that can make us love or hate them, but what I'm talking about is something objective. Objective like the fact that Dream Theater knows how to play, and even though they disgust me to the point of vomiting, I can't say they don't know how to play. They simply have the sound.
And yes, there are a thousand albums with ultra-mega-cool productions, but Pretty Hate Machine not only has something that until then was rarely heard on the charts, but even now, where everything that sells seems to be super polished and hyper-compressed, even now that you can endlessly dig online looking for niche artists, even now it's hard to find albums with a similar sound. Maybe the taste has evolved, maybe the vocal parts of Down in It now seem like lousy rap, maybe now The Only Time and Ringfinger seem like half tacky keyboard-driven messes, but find me something else that sounds like this. If you don't like Pretty Hate Machine, you probably just need to turn up the volume.
Do you like big guitars? Listen to it like a rock album. Do you like electronics? Listen to it like a tunz-tunz album. Don't like meatheads? Yet an album with such a sound can be thoroughly enjoyed even by listening to it 99% with your head and 1% with your heart.

With this rambling, I just wanted to get a few things off my chest and share how I've grown as a listener. And I hope those who read this will be lenient with me if, in the end, I've discovered the wheel and written a duplicate.