Nine Inch Nails Biography

Biography of Nine Inch Nails. Detailed Nine Inch Nails profile and review.

Nine Inch Nails (NIN) is a critically and commercially successful American band formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1988 by Trent Reznor. Axcess magazine interviewed Reznor after the release of The Downward Spiral in 1994. They asked him how he came up with the name Nine Inch Nails and this was his reply:
"I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names."

The Nine Inch Nails "NIN" logo was designed so that Trent Reznor could have a design that in his own words "looked cool on my leather jacket." It is also interesting to note that the font used in the "NIN" logo was modeled after the font used in the album art for the Talking Heads' album Remain In Light. NIN's sound has variously been described as alternative, electronica, heavy metal, rock, synth pop, or, most commonly, industrial. Regarding his music being categorized as industrial, Reznor had this to say in a 1994 Axcess magazine interview:
"What was originally called industrial music was about 20 years ago Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept. We have very little to do with it other than there is noise in my music and there is noise in theirs. I'm working in the context of a pop song structure whereas those bands didn't. And because someone didn't come up with a new name that separates those two somewhat unrelated genres, it tends to irritate all the old school fans waving their flags of alternativeness and obscurity. So, I'd say I've borrowed from certain styles and bands like that."

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NIN's songs cover a range of genres; as a body of work, they cannot be pigeonholed. "The Perfect Drug" has the flavor of drum and bass, vocals in "Down in It" seem influenced by early rap and hip-hop, "Happiness in Slavery" is in the vein of Skinny Puppy and Ministry, "The Frail" is a melancholy piano piece, and most of Pretty Hate Machine could be considered dark synth pop.

NIN's debut album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), largely consists of studio versions of demo recordings. This was also NIN's first collaboration with producer Mark Ellis a.k.a. Flood. It went triple platinum in the US and produced the singles "Head Like a Hole," "Down in It" and "Sin". Music videos were made for these three tracks, but the one for "Sin" was never released to the public, due to video never being finished. However, since 1997 this video has been available on Halo 12.

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NIN's second major release was Broken (1992), an EP of six tracks plus two bonus tracks. It was originally released in a fold-out format, containing the first six tracks on a regular CD and an additional three-inch minidisc with the remaining bonus tracks. It was later released as one CD, with the bonus songs as "hidden" tracks 98 and 99. The song "Wish" won a Grammy in the "metal" category. Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Coil directed a music video for "Happiness in Slavery," which was universally banned due to its graphic content. The video depicts performance artist Bob Flanagan strapping himself to a machine that subsequently pleasures, tortures and kills him. A video for "Pinion" aired twice on MTV before being banned for its objectionable content, although images from it did become a fixture in the opening title sequence of the MTV show 120 Minutes. A full length video informally called The Broken Movie was also made by Sleazy, but has not seen an official release. Broken was followed by the remix EP Fixed.

NIN's second full album and third major release was The Downward Spiral (1994). This was NIN's second collaboration with Mark Ellis (Flood). It went quadruple platinum and is often considered by critics to be NIN's best work. There were two singles released, "March of the Pigs", "Closer", "Hurt" was sent to radio only, but never released as a single, and "piggy" was also only sent to radio. Music videos were made for the singles "March of the Pigs", "Closer", and "Hurt", with the edited MTV version of "Closer" becoming very successful. The album's final track, "Hurt", would enjoy success once again when it was covered, with slight alterations to the lyrics, by Johnny Cash in 2003. The Downward Spiral was followed by the remix EP Further Down the Spiral. A remastered version of the album was released on November 23, 2004, with an accompanying CD of b-sides and rarities. The Remaster was also released as a two-sided DualDisc Format The SACD edition of the remastered album featured multichannel and stereo SACD versions of the album as well as a remastered standard CD layer, disc 2 featured stereo SACD and standard CD layers. The DualDisc contains a remastered CD-Audio on one side and features a DVD-Audio format side containing High Resolution Stereo and 5.1 Surround mixes of the entire album with expanded album art, a discography and Music Videos [Closer(in Stereo and 5.1 audio), March of the Pigs, and Hurt]

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NIN's fourth major release was the two-disk album The Fragile (1999). It produced three singles, one released in the US ("The Day the World Went Away"), one in the UK ("We're In This Together") released as a 3 part single, and one in Japan and Australia ("Into The Void"). Music videos for "We're In This Together", "Into the Void", and "Starfuckers Inc." (retitled as "Starsuckers, Inc.") were aired in the US. The Fragile was followed by the remix album Things Falling Apart. It has sold about 900,000 copies to date.

NIN's fifth major release, With Teeth (2005), was written and recorded following Reznor's painful battle with alcohol addiction and substance abuse. The music video for the first single, "The Hand That Feeds" premiered on the official NIN website rather than on the traditional music video channel. The album was leaked before its official release. It was officially released on May 3, 2005 in a DualDisc format as well as CD-Audio. Though the new album lacks any liner notes, the website features access to download a digital PDF Poster full of lush artwork and stylized liner notes and lyrics. The single was also released in a format for Garageband so that it could be remixied by anyone with the program. The band also allowed the entire album to be listened to in streaming audio at Myspace beginning April 27, 2005.

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Nine Inch Nails dropped out of the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards show because of a disagreement with MTV over the use of an image of George W. Bush as a backdrop to the band's performance of "The Hand That Feeds", which includes such lyrics as:
What if this whole crusade's a charade
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood on which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine

Each Nine Inch Nails release is given a sequential number, with the word "Halo" preceding it (eg. The Downward Spiral is also known as Halo 8). Many independent and new wave records follow similar numbering schemes. Broken, the unreleased short film directed by Peter Christopherson, contains the videos for "Pinion", "Wish" and "Happiness in Slavery". It also features the song "Help Me I Am in Hell", set to a black screen, and the song "Gave Up", set to scenes within the film. In colloquial usage it is commonly referred to as, "the Broken Movie."

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NIN's mud-soaked performance at Woodstock '94 is one of their most famous moments. The band earned a Grammy for "Best Metal Performance" for their live performance of "Happiness in Slavery" when it was included on the 1996 Woodstock '94 double CD set. The performance was also released as a bootleg album known as "When The Whip Comes Down." NIN created the ambient music for id Software's computer game Quake in 1996. As a tribute to this, the programmers of the game included a nail gun as a weapon, whose ammo boxes bore the NIN logo. This music was available as audio tracks on the Quake CD. Chris Vrenna, formerly of NIN, created the intro for the popular video game for id Software. John Carmack, the lead programmer for id Software, wanted to work with Reznor for additional in-game music, but due to management problems courtesy of John Malm (Reznor's former manager), he was unable to allot time for studio work for the new ambient soundtrack. Trent Reznor's sound and music files for Doom 3 have been rumored to be floating around the internet.

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