Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Monday, February 02, 2009
Unexpected Reactions / Power In Old Age

My musical tastes have always been all over the map, but in the past year they've really been something else entirely. For most of my life I never felt inclined to be obsessive about particular tracks or artists--there was always so much music out there that it seems too easy to always listen to "something else". Something has clicked within me though in the last 12 months though that has lead me to great obsessions, over artists and individual tracks in particular. I haven't the time to name them all but "It's All Over Now," "Sea of Love," "Untitled 2," "Isolation," and, most recently, "Dreams" (in covers, not the original) have eaten my soul alive with their infectious goodness. And beyond the songs are a few "artists" whose tunes have rained down upon my brain like drizzling napalm over the past six months are Deerhunter/Atlas Sound, Lil Wayne, Nina Simone, 50s rock/60s soul, and--most curiously--Nine Inch Nails.

Deerhunter and Lil Wayne both came into my life in 2008 as new and previously unexplored artists who each share the talents of being both immensely creative and insanely prolific. Bradford Cox emits a nonending stream of albums, EPs, singles, "bonus projects" and internet-only nonsense under both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound outfits, and Lil Wayne drops a new mixtape more or less every time he sneezes. The quality control for both isn't amazing (Bradford sometimes too cute and boring; Wayne sometimes just terrible), but their genius is unquestionable and their tenacity unrivaled. Therefore, it's not too surprising how much these men have affected me, but that it took me so long to hear (and love) them.

The 50s rock/60s soul comes as a direct outcropping of Bradford's obsession with both of these musics, feeding my brain both with his covers of such songs as well as his constant discussions of them. Hearing swaying, swooning reverb guitar, or soulful paeans to a time forgotten make me well up into a ball of fake-nostalgic nothing. It's a kind of haunting empty reductiveness that makes me think of my childhood, my grandparents, David Lynch, and a time that I imagined once existed but never really did. Which is to say the same general "theme" of shit I've cared about for most of my life.

So that's all very sensible. But then we get to the outlier--NINE INCH NAILS. [Should I be writing that as "NINE INCH NAILS (!!!?!!?!)"?] Before Nine Inch Nails came into my life again this year, I last cared about them in 1997, when the soundtrack to David Lynch's Lost Highway came out and it not only featured the fantastic Nine Inch Nails "Perfect Drug" single, but was also entirely compiled carefully and lovingly by Trent Reznor as hands-down the best and creepiest "stands-on-its-own" movie soundtrack I've ever heard. Not just a collection of good or appropriate songs, but a disconcertingly spun web of malevolent sonic envelopement that matches perfectly the ghostly darkness and fear-driven disorientation of its cinematic twin. But I digress: because even then, in 1997, all the new music Nine Inch Nails fans got was this soundtrack, featuring one single Nine Inch Nails song. The last new NIN album to come out (not counting the reams of singles and remix collections) was the schoolmom-hating Downward Spiral in 1994, and the time that passed from '94-'97 was a pretty long stretch for a 15 year old boy. By the time Spiral sequel The Fragile dropped in '99 I had already moved too far on to even bother listening to it once.

I was pretty ok with this--the second half of the '90s saw a shittening** of both the power of Nine Inch Nails bombast as well as the status of Guru Reznor, who seemed to put more focus on being an alcoholic and helping to further the career of Marilyn Manson (and thus 1,000,000 shitty, terrible, derivative metal/nu-metal/rap-metal/stoner-metal bands popular only in the Midwest). Frankly, by 2001, liking--let alone stepping up for--Nine Inch Nails seemed almost embarrassing.

Flash forward many years to May 2008, when I got an email from a friend saying, "Hey dude, you might wanna check this out--Nine Inch Nails just released their first album for free, so grab it if you're interested." For whatever reason I went for it, and then waited three months before listening to the album for the first time, one late night coming home from work at 10pm in late summer. And BOOM. BOOM. BOOOOOOOOOOOM.

I cannot for the life of me explain it, but from the beginning drum thuds of first song "1,000,000" I was just blown away. I imagined in my head I would listen to half the album, maybe even only one or two songs, just a few times and then delete it. But instead what I heard was an intense, enrapturing rock and roll assault that left me begging for more.

It is clear that above all the success of this album, called The Slip, comes from its non-belabored immediacy. More than most "difficult artists" in the rock industry, Trent Reznor established a reputation over the years as having the Frank Zappa /Billy Corgan-esque maniacal obsession to detail while on an illusory quest for a kind of perverted perfection that would never be found. And frankly, the harder he tried, I think the more he struggled. The Slip just feels fast and fresh--yes, it's got the standard Reznor sonic sheen, but it feels gestational in a raw way that suits Reznor unbelievably well.

My only knock against The Slip, if I have any at all, is the fact that it's really more of an EP--six powerful, intense rock songs before suddenly collapsing into an "At The Heart of It All" / "The Beauty of Being Numb" quiet period into >> instrumental soundscape for 5minutes. The disc closes up with one more burner, but the tracks prior just don't rock enough and don't hit the astonishing heights of album highlights, "Discipline", "Echoplex," or "1,000,000". But honestly, this is all quibbling, and there's an even an argument for the slowdown inclusion as helping to supply evidence of "what a 40 minute distillation of everything Nine Inch Nails have done could be". I'm not saying it's bad or even disappointing, I'm just pointing out what isn't perfect.

And so my intense reaction to The Slip was such that it has now lead me running backward into the past, beginning first with Reznor's early 2008 double-disc album of shelved instrumentals Ghosts I-IV (ZZzzzzzz; see above) and continuing to 2007's Year Zero--which, after reading the Pitchfork and Allmusic Reviews, I was ready to love even more the The Slip. Sadly, Year Zero just isn't as good--a few good-to-great songs, some unmemorable fare, and a few clunkers--but I am at least, in this still-Slip adled phase, able to enjoy it as the next best thing to The Album I Really Want to Hear. Then, just last week I added the Year Zero remix album Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (umm yeah) to the feedbag and while it too is inconsistent, it contains a few tracks even more inspired than the source material, namely two remixes by--of all people--the Kronos Quartet and German experimental artist Fennesz. These two tracks, particularly the latter, make me excited for post-Slip future that I am already praying might come.

So yeah, what the fuck?? This is probably one of the last musical developments I would have expected to have experienced in 2008. But in a bizarre way, I feel like Trent has helped blow the doors off my musical shack and I feel more ready and willing than in many years to seek out and slurp out the most intense and experimental sonic undertakings I can find. I feel a hunger for musical discovery that I haven't felt in probably five years, since I had my experimental electronics radio show in college (RIP, Postmodern Glitch) and i thirsted after new sounds each and every week. And it feels FUCKING GREAT.

Hilarious endpoint for tonight's musings: my boss is about to start doing a media industry radio podcast, and I have been tasked as both producer of the show as well as creator of a theme song. I went down to our radio booth with our engineer and combed through the mess of free-rights audio loops in our library and put together a couple of samples, a downbeat jazz bit (which I thought was both talk-radio and age appropriate) and a second more upbeat 60s sounding funk guitar bit. Neither of them felt quite right to me and I had a feeling they wouldn't feel right to him either... and sure enough, they didn't. He said to me, "Look, I just want something edgier, more contemporary. Rocking. Like AC/DC maybe." And so I just said, Ok, fuck it: "Max, this is what I'd use if i were making a theme for my own radioshow" and proceeded to lay down the intro to "1,000,000"... and he absolutely loved it. I then cut the drums in half, looped the guitar riff, and dropped in the vocal parts and BOOM, there was our show intro, much to my astonishment and amusement. And best of all the song (and album) was released under a under a "Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial share-alike license," so I can use it royalty-free in any way I want. Totally fucking crazy!

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Anyway, that's enough for now. I leave you with the following mp3s for your enjoyment and experiential knowledge-gaining:

-- Download the entire Nine Inch Nails album The Slip here
-- Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline," from The Slip
-- Nine Inch Nails, "Echoplex," from The Slip
-- Nine Inch Nails, "Another Version of the Truth (Kronos Quartet mix)" from Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D
-- Nine Inch Nails, "In This Twilight (Fennesz mix)," from Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D
-- Theme song to Max Media, featuring "1,000,000"

FROM ABOVE:
** yes i just created the word "shittening"

Labels: CRAZY, deerhunter, Lil Wayne, loved sounds, mp3, Nine Inch Nails

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 2/02/2009 07:34:00 PM 0 comments

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