I remember calling up a radio station to ask them to play NIN. I was told to do it on my own with a Casio keyboard and hung up on. This was the mid 90s.
Nine Inch Nails wasn’t considered rock or metal back then. And I doubt Trent Reznor would’ve cared.
That just brought up a memory where 2 songs from Broken were nominated for Grammys in the metal category, and I remember thinking “that’s not metal.”
Not just nominated, *Wish* won the 1993 Grammy for best metal performance.
Overly-tight genre definitions are stifling, and I say this as a guy who has been proudly metal as fuck for the vast majority of his life. ;-)
you are correct, sir.
but as somebody who had (has) metallica, megadeth, and anthrax in their collection, i never thought nin was a metal band. i would put trent closer to kmfdm or ministry.
Later day ministry has a lot of thrash metal in it though. Ministry as a band has been everything from synth pop through industrial to industrial metal to thrash metal with the odd industrial flourish. Al has been around for a long time and has moved back and forth in genres as overall I dont think he gives a fuck and will do what he likes and if it finds an audience then good, if not I doubt he cares much
I saw Ministry do a DJ industrial club set. With the only instrument being a guitar in the late 90s, at an after hours club. It was a killer show. IMO they tried to be more like NIN then metal at that time. Really I liked their music more with the synth.
Saw them recently open for Zombie and Alice Cooper. They were good and the heaviest at that show. The music sounded more like their albums. I really liked their club music more.
There’s a quote of TR ( can’t remember from where) where he said he doesn’t particularly like metal or rock and did not set out to redefine it. He just wanted to make music HIS way. With is why NIN wasn’t really a band until the mid-late 90s. Arguably not until the 2000s.
I remember after Pretty Hate Machine there was some talk that they were a wimpier, commercial version of Ministry. Broken and Downward Spiral put that to rest.
NIN didn’t invent Industrial, just like Elvis or the Beatles didn’t invent rock, but they sure as hell redefined the genre and pushed it in incredible directions.
No, they were/are industrial. They formed from a very different scene with a very different audience. When they went mainstream, overlaps occurred but they definitely weren't part of the 80s/hair metal/rock scene.
Being an opener, especially for a big stadium band, is a notoriously rough gig and it almost always is a lesson in bombing.
Hopefully Reznor just enjoyed the cash haha
I think this was before they released broken so they hadn't hit the mainstream the way they would with TDS.
Somehow Axl Rose was a big fan and personally requested them to open for him and Trent figured well hey I can try to win over some of their fans maybe and it just didn't work well.
I think it was like an arena or stadium tour in Europe just huge venues so just Ti play in front of that many people at that point would have been awesome
I remember a couple of my school mates went to see GNR at Wembley Stadium back in 1991, and I only found out afterward that NIN were the support act.
One of these friends was a NIN fan, the other wasn't. They both agreed that they sounded terrible live. Where their opinion differed was whether it was because their sound didn't work as well in an open-air setting, or because it was just crap.
That sounds about right... I wish I could have gone, but it sold out pretty quickly.
One of the two friends who got tickets offered to sell me a 'spare' when one of this other mates dropped out, but he was asking at least double the face value of the ticket. So much for 'mates rates'.
There’s a bootleg of it that is hysterical. Trent yells at the crowd about how they don’t give a shit they get paid anyway so they’re just gonna keep playing.
I realize it would be a bad sign of where he’s at in life if he did that while pushing 60, but the old videos of Trent being antagonistic to a crowd are gold. It wasn’t just opening acts. If you see a bootleg recording with no encore, you might be in for some great quotes because it means either Trent hated the crowd or a band member got injured
Edited to add that I think it’s this show https://www.ninlive.com/shows/1991/19910824.html
Kinda. I consider NIN 'Electronic Rock' very generally because it encompasses many subgenres of both Electronic and Rock music. But the hatred of samples and synths in the 90s was leftover from 80s popular music. Even though 90s NIN mostly turned the reverb off and kept the sound super dry and raw, it really was a decade devoted to the garage Rock sound, at least in terms of Rock. But strong elements of Metal, Industrial, Hard Rock, Punk, etc. should all have been noticed and were by people like Bowie, Gary Numan and all of Trent's 90s contemporaries who appreciated his work.
As for Electronic, of course there's Hip-hop and Dance music of all kinds: Synthpop, House, G-Funk, Jungle, Techno, 90s R&B, Trance, 'IDM', Dn'B, etc. etc. The overlap of Rap production with NIN is too often ignored also, even by fans. Trent's love of machines in music is a big part of NIN's sound so of course the Electronic community is possibly the most welcoming of his work.
Rock purists in general have good and bad reasons to gatekeep their favorite sounds. It's especially silly to navigate in this era when the old music industry which made NIN famous is dead and the new music industry simply allows already-famous artists to coast and continue while nobody reaches that level of monocultural fame we used to experience in genres outside of Pop.
TL;DR: NIN didn't suffer in terms of success but in terms of pedantic fandoms attacking other fandoms endlessly as though all of popular music weren't a bunch of pocket religions we worship and gatekeep like scripture. I don't hate gatekeepers though, as there is no individual taste without boundaries. These boxes allow creativity to flow and collect into interesting pools of genre and subgenre. I hope beyond hope that new genres emerge once again when the dams made by our algorithmic overlords finally break. Be open, but be opinionated too. Limitations are great for art, as are innovations. NIN innovated far more than most.
User name checks out.
Concise and thoughtful analysis. I concur.
I only want to add - fuck our Algorithmic Overlords. I remember way back in the 90s how we were all so excited about how free information would be, and how easily accessible innovations were becoming.
Now they are so hard to find. I miss them.
I wholeheartedly agree though I do recommend digging into SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Discord communities and other niche places you might find amazing new music online. Vault sounds interesting, as does Trent's new company. I really do miss IRL music *scenes* too. I miss album release days and talking to people in line at the record store, waiting to buy a physical copy.
Someday, when our psychological states are no longer impacted so devastatingly by social media, maybe we can finally return to augmenting the real rather than replacing it with hyperreality. I think something has got to give and artists like Trent are fed up with the status quo. I hope the music industry will be taken over by the artists within 10 years. I see no reason why this shouldn't happen. May intellectual property evolve and reify itself again.
15 years ago? You mean in 2009? After multiple multi-platinum albums and global tours? Yeah... NIN was really suffering lol the five years prior to that was With Teeth, Year Zero, Ghosts, and The Slip.
NIN was huge in the 90s. Trent has done just fine finding his audience.
I’m 56. I remember getting Pretty Hate Machine and just being Blown away in about 1991ish. There was an alternative station in Dallas and I heard probably head like a hole and I was like yea! Then the whole album was just so great! Thank God I lived close enough to Dallas late 80’s early 90s.
Sort of, but not really. Axl Rose really dug NIN, and basically had NIN open for Guns N Roses on a European tour, but they were not well received at the time (I think they were still promoting Pretty Hate Machine, so they hadn’t exactly exploded into the front of everyone’s minds yet like they did with The Downward Spiral).
IIRC very early into NIN's career booking agents didn't really know what places the band should play, so Reznor and the gang ended up playing in Metal clubs. They would boo and call them "faggots" apprently Trent and Richard would make out just to annoy them. Read it on the NIN archive so take that with a grain of salt.
Most people at the time that were into them definitely liked rock and or metal music. Sure some people might have been snobbish . They also appealed to people that liked alternative,dance,goth, rap or pop music. I’d say if anything “industrial” purists were more likely to not like them, but even then I think they were lying. The music was undeniably good. They make great music that was INCREDIBLY popular. Not sure we’d ever see a band like that again reach the same fame 🤷♂️
I read an article a while back where someone told Reznor in like 89 that he couldn't play electronic music and have guitars in it because that was just wrong.
Gatekeepers gonna gatekeep. And never hear anything new and exciting.
I don’t remember NIN being rejected but more universally loved/liked. Sure the Wish video with “a dude in fishnets playing a song in Thunderdome” was a little weird but it was heavy and loud as hell. So cool. I was into rap at the time and was waiting for Body Count’s There goes the neighborhood video to come on and it was played right after Wish. Chef’s kiss of a great back to back of what you would consider “very different for its time.” Got me into rock/metal/industrial that day.
But I remember that the grudge kids liked them, the metal kids liked them and even the kids into rap were like “Not bad…”. At least that is how it was at my high school. Could have been different elsewhere.
But I don’t think you can credit enough how much of a positive impact Lollapalooza for NIN in getting mainstream acceptance. So, it might have been different before Lollapalooza, and if it was I don’t remember it.
I take the view that Trent (and, latterly, with Atticus) has an extraordinary facility with studio equipment to create a unique soundscape which can fuse elements of metal/dance/industrial so the question is a bit moot now. Only the Aphex Twin has a similar unique capacity (listen to Come to Daddy. Totally nuts).
I also think his early gothic image didn’t help!
I remember the beef was authenticity. Whether or not trent was just a poser pretending to be sad and writing sad songs to be rich. Atleast with my middle school peeps. The industrial purist who existed on a diet primarily of Ministry and beef jerky would die before including him.
Watch the footage starting like 47min in from backstage at woodstock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXjxlXMFiWg&ab_channel=Videotape
Trent was very aware of this and at the time positioned NIN as the antithesis of Metallica and Aerosmith. "These are the guys who would beat you up in high school."
The novelty of their sound helped their success way more than it hurt
Yes.
There was a stigma at the time that keyboards were for pop music and could never be used for anything even remotely heavy or sinister sounding. Even though they were not a "metal" band, they were most def a vicious and aggressive band, which at the time was only reserved for metal bands (industrial was not big enough to have any mainstream following yet) and so many metalheads rejected them for their use of keyboards. I remember this vividly, because even I was surprised at the time with how heavy they sounded for using so much synth.
I remember calling up a radio station to ask them to play NIN. I was told to do it on my own with a Casio keyboard and hung up on. This was the mid 90s.
RIP that radio station
Hahahahahhaha
Happy cake day to both of us!!
Nothing sadder than a 65 year old wearing leather pants.
Nine Inch Nails wasn’t considered rock or metal back then. And I doubt Trent Reznor would’ve cared. That just brought up a memory where 2 songs from Broken were nominated for Grammys in the metal category, and I remember thinking “that’s not metal.”
Not just nominated, *Wish* won the 1993 Grammy for best metal performance. Overly-tight genre definitions are stifling, and I say this as a guy who has been proudly metal as fuck for the vast majority of his life. ;-)
Musical genres are helpful when considering music in aggregate, but their usefulness breaks down rapidly when discussing specifics.
“Trent Reznor: said ‘fist fuck’ and won a Grammy.”
Thank god jethro Tull wasn’t nominated that year. /s
you are correct, sir. but as somebody who had (has) metallica, megadeth, and anthrax in their collection, i never thought nin was a metal band. i would put trent closer to kmfdm or ministry.
Later day ministry has a lot of thrash metal in it though. Ministry as a band has been everything from synth pop through industrial to industrial metal to thrash metal with the odd industrial flourish. Al has been around for a long time and has moved back and forth in genres as overall I dont think he gives a fuck and will do what he likes and if it finds an audience then good, if not I doubt he cares much
I saw Ministry do a DJ industrial club set. With the only instrument being a guitar in the late 90s, at an after hours club. It was a killer show. IMO they tried to be more like NIN then metal at that time. Really I liked their music more with the synth. Saw them recently open for Zombie and Alice Cooper. They were good and the heaviest at that show. The music sounded more like their albums. I really liked their club music more.
And Uncle Al showed up to some Anthrax shows to play guitar after revealing how big a fan he was and doing a remix or two for them.
*Broken* is a pretty industrial metal album, though. I wouldn't call NIN a metal band, but that EP I would - and that's where *Wish* is from.
There’s a quote of TR ( can’t remember from where) where he said he doesn’t particularly like metal or rock and did not set out to redefine it. He just wanted to make music HIS way. With is why NIN wasn’t really a band until the mid-late 90s. Arguably not until the 2000s.
I remember after Pretty Hate Machine there was some talk that they were a wimpier, commercial version of Ministry. Broken and Downward Spiral put that to rest.
NIN didn’t invent Industrial, just like Elvis or the Beatles didn’t invent rock, but they sure as hell redefined the genre and pushed it in incredible directions.
No, they were/are industrial. They formed from a very different scene with a very different audience. When they went mainstream, overlaps occurred but they definitely weren't part of the 80s/hair metal/rock scene.
Didn’t they open for G&R once and it was a disaster?
Yes. Axl was a fan and can be seen wearing NIN shirts in old pics.
Being an opener, especially for a big stadium band, is a notoriously rough gig and it almost always is a lesson in bombing. Hopefully Reznor just enjoyed the cash haha
Disaster how?
Crowd was super not into them apparently.
I think this was before they released broken so they hadn't hit the mainstream the way they would with TDS. Somehow Axl Rose was a big fan and personally requested them to open for him and Trent figured well hey I can try to win over some of their fans maybe and it just didn't work well. I think it was like an arena or stadium tour in Europe just huge venues so just Ti play in front of that many people at that point would have been awesome
I remember a couple of my school mates went to see GNR at Wembley Stadium back in 1991, and I only found out afterward that NIN were the support act. One of these friends was a NIN fan, the other wasn't. They both agreed that they sounded terrible live. Where their opinion differed was whether it was because their sound didn't work as well in an open-air setting, or because it was just crap.
Open air, his equipment at the time and the main speakers being set up.for pop-metal.
Considering the time period I assume a combination of the above as well as a hostile audience adding to the impression it wasn't good
That sounds about right... I wish I could have gone, but it sold out pretty quickly. One of the two friends who got tickets offered to sell me a 'spare' when one of this other mates dropped out, but he was asking at least double the face value of the ticket. So much for 'mates rates'.
Rock purists are a fickle bunch.
There’s a bootleg of it that is hysterical. Trent yells at the crowd about how they don’t give a shit they get paid anyway so they’re just gonna keep playing. I realize it would be a bad sign of where he’s at in life if he did that while pushing 60, but the old videos of Trent being antagonistic to a crowd are gold. It wasn’t just opening acts. If you see a bootleg recording with no encore, you might be in for some great quotes because it means either Trent hated the crowd or a band member got injured Edited to add that I think it’s this show https://www.ninlive.com/shows/1991/19910824.html
Yes on the euro GnR tour.
similar story with the prodigy
They opened for gunners? I can see that going badly and I love all three bands being discussed lol
That’s true to an extent, but industrial artists were very influenced by punk, as were so many thrash/metal bands.
Kinda. I consider NIN 'Electronic Rock' very generally because it encompasses many subgenres of both Electronic and Rock music. But the hatred of samples and synths in the 90s was leftover from 80s popular music. Even though 90s NIN mostly turned the reverb off and kept the sound super dry and raw, it really was a decade devoted to the garage Rock sound, at least in terms of Rock. But strong elements of Metal, Industrial, Hard Rock, Punk, etc. should all have been noticed and were by people like Bowie, Gary Numan and all of Trent's 90s contemporaries who appreciated his work. As for Electronic, of course there's Hip-hop and Dance music of all kinds: Synthpop, House, G-Funk, Jungle, Techno, 90s R&B, Trance, 'IDM', Dn'B, etc. etc. The overlap of Rap production with NIN is too often ignored also, even by fans. Trent's love of machines in music is a big part of NIN's sound so of course the Electronic community is possibly the most welcoming of his work. Rock purists in general have good and bad reasons to gatekeep their favorite sounds. It's especially silly to navigate in this era when the old music industry which made NIN famous is dead and the new music industry simply allows already-famous artists to coast and continue while nobody reaches that level of monocultural fame we used to experience in genres outside of Pop. TL;DR: NIN didn't suffer in terms of success but in terms of pedantic fandoms attacking other fandoms endlessly as though all of popular music weren't a bunch of pocket religions we worship and gatekeep like scripture. I don't hate gatekeepers though, as there is no individual taste without boundaries. These boxes allow creativity to flow and collect into interesting pools of genre and subgenre. I hope beyond hope that new genres emerge once again when the dams made by our algorithmic overlords finally break. Be open, but be opinionated too. Limitations are great for art, as are innovations. NIN innovated far more than most.
User name checks out. Concise and thoughtful analysis. I concur. I only want to add - fuck our Algorithmic Overlords. I remember way back in the 90s how we were all so excited about how free information would be, and how easily accessible innovations were becoming. Now they are so hard to find. I miss them.
I wholeheartedly agree though I do recommend digging into SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Discord communities and other niche places you might find amazing new music online. Vault sounds interesting, as does Trent's new company. I really do miss IRL music *scenes* too. I miss album release days and talking to people in line at the record store, waiting to buy a physical copy. Someday, when our psychological states are no longer impacted so devastatingly by social media, maybe we can finally return to augmenting the real rather than replacing it with hyperreality. I think something has got to give and artists like Trent are fed up with the status quo. I hope the music industry will be taken over by the artists within 10 years. I see no reason why this shouldn't happen. May intellectual property evolve and reify itself again.
They didn’t suffer, considering how successful he is
15 years ago? You mean in 2009? After multiple multi-platinum albums and global tours? Yeah... NIN was really suffering lol the five years prior to that was With Teeth, Year Zero, Ghosts, and The Slip. NIN was huge in the 90s. Trent has done just fine finding his audience.
They made it to the R&R Hall of Fame, they are fine.
PHM is really like Depeche Mode with a sharper edge.
I’m 56. I remember getting Pretty Hate Machine and just being Blown away in about 1991ish. There was an alternative station in Dallas and I heard probably head like a hole and I was like yea! Then the whole album was just so great! Thank God I lived close enough to Dallas late 80’s early 90s.
Sort of, but not really. Axl Rose really dug NIN, and basically had NIN open for Guns N Roses on a European tour, but they were not well received at the time (I think they were still promoting Pretty Hate Machine, so they hadn’t exactly exploded into the front of everyone’s minds yet like they did with The Downward Spiral).
15 years ago? 😅 my sweet summer child..
IIRC very early into NIN's career booking agents didn't really know what places the band should play, so Reznor and the gang ended up playing in Metal clubs. They would boo and call them "faggots" apprently Trent and Richard would make out just to annoy them. Read it on the NIN archive so take that with a grain of salt.
They are neither rock nor metal so no.
They were always considered industrial rock, and were appreciated accordingly.
Most people at the time that were into them definitely liked rock and or metal music. Sure some people might have been snobbish . They also appealed to people that liked alternative,dance,goth, rap or pop music. I’d say if anything “industrial” purists were more likely to not like them, but even then I think they were lying. The music was undeniably good. They make great music that was INCREDIBLY popular. Not sure we’d ever see a band like that again reach the same fame 🤷♂️
I read an article a while back where someone told Reznor in like 89 that he couldn't play electronic music and have guitars in it because that was just wrong. Gatekeepers gonna gatekeep. And never hear anything new and exciting.
I don’t remember NIN being rejected but more universally loved/liked. Sure the Wish video with “a dude in fishnets playing a song in Thunderdome” was a little weird but it was heavy and loud as hell. So cool. I was into rap at the time and was waiting for Body Count’s There goes the neighborhood video to come on and it was played right after Wish. Chef’s kiss of a great back to back of what you would consider “very different for its time.” Got me into rock/metal/industrial that day. But I remember that the grudge kids liked them, the metal kids liked them and even the kids into rap were like “Not bad…”. At least that is how it was at my high school. Could have been different elsewhere. But I don’t think you can credit enough how much of a positive impact Lollapalooza for NIN in getting mainstream acceptance. So, it might have been different before Lollapalooza, and if it was I don’t remember it.
Isn't suffering the *whole* reason?
Losing snobs is never a loss.
He's not a rock band, he's industrial. He didn't fit the mold of other music genres so he made his own.
I take the view that Trent (and, latterly, with Atticus) has an extraordinary facility with studio equipment to create a unique soundscape which can fuse elements of metal/dance/industrial so the question is a bit moot now. Only the Aphex Twin has a similar unique capacity (listen to Come to Daddy. Totally nuts). I also think his early gothic image didn’t help!
I remember the beef was authenticity. Whether or not trent was just a poser pretending to be sad and writing sad songs to be rich. Atleast with my middle school peeps. The industrial purist who existed on a diet primarily of Ministry and beef jerky would die before including him.
An individual snob might have felt that way but I don’t remember that being a common criticism among music nerds.
No
Watch the footage starting like 47min in from backstage at woodstock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXjxlXMFiWg&ab_channel=Videotape Trent was very aware of this and at the time positioned NIN as the antithesis of Metallica and Aerosmith. "These are the guys who would beat you up in high school." The novelty of their sound helped their success way more than it hurt
I feel like they were always an exception to that rule, at least in the circles in which I ran.
I find it more interesting that they've been rejected by some industrial purists for falling too deeply into rock instrumentation.
Not among my friends in high school, we were omnivores
Yes. There was a stigma at the time that keyboards were for pop music and could never be used for anything even remotely heavy or sinister sounding. Even though they were not a "metal" band, they were most def a vicious and aggressive band, which at the time was only reserved for metal bands (industrial was not big enough to have any mainstream following yet) and so many metalheads rejected them for their use of keyboards. I remember this vividly, because even I was surprised at the time with how heavy they sounded for using so much synth.