The Erotics of Trent Reznor
Nine Inch Nails made videos where machines ate people’s organs — and were the last rock band to write a great love song.
I do not think Trent Reznor set out to become a tween sex icon. That he became one, anyway, is beyond doubt.
My memories of Nine Inch Nails fandom, all set in middle school or high school, are inseparable from the context of adolescent thirst. Reznor was the muddy, thrashing, be-tank-topped body on my girlfriends’ bedroom walls. He was the ball of raw, pained energy, post-Cobain, pre-Catalano, through which we learned to fetishize male self-pity. Pretty Hate Machine was handed to me, in secret, on my twelfth birthday. Owning a Nine Inch Nails CD was a key to a secret club, a rite of initiation. You couldn’t play NIN where your parents could hear it; you couldn’t let them know what you knew. There were songs on there. Songs about fucking.
The Fragile, the last Nine Inch Nails album I bought in stores, is twenty years old this year. Reznor has an Oscar and a wife and a paycheck from Apple. Like countless musicians — Harry Styles; the Beatles — he has shed the stigma of being some sweaty, shameful girl secret, and become an artiste. A legitimate musician; a part of the pantheon. By which I mean, mostly, men like him.
