Nine Inch Nails Year Zero (Review)
By Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone on April 17, 2007
The best thing to hit YouTube in the past few weeks is Sad Kermit
singing Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." Everybody's favorite Muppet amphibian
strums an acoustic guitar, warbling Trent Reznor's classic ballad of
self-loathing to a montage of scenes illustrating his degradation: Kermit
shooting up, Kermit passed out in a pile of beer cans and pill bottles,
Kermit blowing rails off a copy of The God Delusion near a topless photo
of Miss Piggy. By the end of the song, Kermit's going down on Rowlf, who
brandishes a leather whip. "You can have it all, my empire of dirt,"
Kermit sings, and you feel his froggy pain. It works because Kermit and
Trent aren't so far apart -- they're both sweet and sad and vulnerable,
behind a brittle formal pose. On Sad Kermit's MySpace page, he sings an
even bleaker NIN song -- "Something I Can Never Have" -- but I don't
know if I'm strong enough to take that one.
Reznor brings the pain on Year Zero, his strongest, weirdest and most
complex record since The Downward Spiral. On his surprise 2005 comeback,
With Teeth, Reznor sounded unsure of himself, sweating for a hit. He
front-loaded it with mediocre radio-rock bangers like "The Hand That
Feeds," pushing the kinkier material to the second half. But after the
success of With Teeth, he's got his bravado back. This time, he's cooked up
a concept album about an American police state, fifteen years in the
future. To suit the paranoid vibe, Year Zero is dense yet minimal,
inspired by the Bomb Squad production on early Public Enemy records. Reznor
leaked the tracks onto the Interwebs by leaving them on USB drives in
bathroom stalls at his European shows, a very Crying of Lot 49 way to do
it.
The target of his rage on Year Zero is "Capital G," and you'll never
guess who that stands for. (Hint: "I pushed a button and elected him to
office/He pushed a button, and it dropped the bomb.") In Capital G's
regime, the military runs the government ("Survivalism") and the church
("God Given"), watching every move you make. The nation keeps a permanent
war going, using up soldiers and spitting them out, until they finally
rebel in the anthem "Your Violent Heart." As science fiction, Year Zero
is nothing special; fifteen years in the future sounds like a
fifteen-year-old X-Files rerun, complete with the slogan "I am trying to
believe." But just by forcing Reznor to get out of his head and imagine the
world beyond his own private Idaho, the concept inspires him musically.
"The Beginning of the End" stays on the scene with a "My Sharona" drum
hook; "Vessel" is a cosmic sex/drug meltdown ("I let you put it in my
mouth/ I let it get under my skin") with a nasty electro-goth disco
twitch.
"Me, I'm Not" is his toughest song since "Closer," which it resembles;
over a sinister, mechanical death-funk groove, Reznor whispers about
dangerous pleasures, pleading, "You've got something I need." (Hey,
another X-Files connection.) In songs like "The Good Soldier," "My Violent
Heart" and "Meet Your Master," Reznor makes facing up to sobriety sound
like a soldier getting over a war, whether he's using militarism as a
metaphor for addiction or vice versa. And not since his debut has he
sung so much about masters, servants, getting down on your knees, bowing
to the one you serve, etc. The density of the mix evokes not just Public
Enemy but Pere Ubu, the 1970s Cleveland punk-industrial pioneers who
did Datapanik in Year Zero, giving NIN more fruitful musical templates
than The Wall ever did. On Year Zero, Reznor doesn't exactly sound like
he's having fun -- does he ever? But he runs out of disc space before he
runs out of ideas, and it's the first time that's happened in quite a
while.
Transcribed by JessicaSarahS