“It’s a bit like learning a new language.” When something is startling and novel, “we don’t always have the reference points to absorb and digest it,” Rubin told me. The producer Rick Rubin bought the first Nine Inch Nails album, “Pretty Hate Machine,” when it came out and didn’t like it at all, but after several months it became his favorite record. He seems to consider silence as important as noise, although noise, in all registers and of all types, is central to the Nine Inch Nails canon. His instrumental music tends to be subtler, sometimes hypnotic, and layered with abstruse remarks. His songs are feral, titanic, rancorous, meticulous, subversive, finely textured, and often deeply affecting. Part of the difficulty is that Reznor’s range is broader than that of most popular musicians, and that he has written both songs and instrumental music. It has been inaptly described as a heavy-metal band, a hard-rock band, and an alternative band. Aficionados who like to categorize popular music have had a hard time categorizing Nine Inch Nails. Since 1989, Reznor has sold sixteen million records as the vehement, brainy, obstinate, and modernist one-man band Nine Inch Nails. Rather than melodies and chords, he thinks of lines accompanying each other, as they might in an orchestral score. ![]() Reznor is more a composer than a songwriter anyway. Reznor also writes songs with a guitar or sitting at a piano, but the method is not natural to him, and it can make him feel like a folksinger, he says, or as if he were imitating Billy Joel. The melodies and phrases that occur to him he records himself singing, regardless of whether the words make sense or are actually words. Since it is a single lane, he can turn the music up loud without worrying that someone in a car beside him is listening. ![]() Often, he makes his way to upper Mullholland Drive, which winds through the hills and feels “optimistic and hopeful,” he told me. Sometimes when Trent Reznor has a fragment of music that might become a song, he drives around Los Angeles, where he lives, with the fragment playing over and over. In ordinary life, Reznor is reserved, but a kind of fury overtakes him in performance.
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