Went to the Nine Inch Nails show here in Chicago on Saturday. Let me tell you a little bit about my nails history.
When I discovered nin, I was in high school. I was the son of a preacher, raised in a small, desperately rural town in the mountains of north carolina. You ever heard of the hatfields and the mccoys? My best friend was a hatfield.
I had just figured out that this god thing wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. More accurately, I was coming into a secularist worldview, one founded on logic and reason and naturalism. It wasn't rebellion, exactly, but it was very clearly rejection, rejection of everything I had ever known or cared about. It was like my body rejecting my heart in favor of my mind. Religion was killing me, and losing religion was worse.
Two things happened at that point. The first was literature. I found books, in a way that I had never found books before. I had always been a reader, but now I was an unspeakable reading machine, an absolute monster of literary tomes. Unfortunately for literature, in college I decided that intellectual literature was pretty much a crock, and that I could make any book say anything I wanted. Became a deconstructionist, and spent my class time figuring out what the teacher wanted the current selection to say, and writing papers that countered that view.
The other thing was music. Growing up, among my friends and family and community, there were two types of music: Honky-Tonk and gospel. Either you sang it while crying into your beer, or you sang it in church. That was it. Nine Inch Nails crashed into my life like, well, like a very angry god with access to a drum machine. It changed me. It broke me and mixed me up and let me settle. It made me better.
That was almost sixteen years ago. Kee-rist, I'm old. But sixteen years is a long time, and people change. I've changed. I'm stable now, I'm solid and secure. I'm still a ninja reader, though less of a deconstructionist and more of a writer. I've gotten past a lot of my personal broken-ness, patched up the little things that seemed like big things, back then. Gotten over it, gotten through it, moved on.
Anyway. It was a good show. You know who you fucking are? I know. Who I fucking am.
When I discovered nin, I was in high school. I was the son of a preacher, raised in a small, desperately rural town in the mountains of north carolina. You ever heard of the hatfields and the mccoys? My best friend was a hatfield.
I had just figured out that this god thing wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. More accurately, I was coming into a secularist worldview, one founded on logic and reason and naturalism. It wasn't rebellion, exactly, but it was very clearly rejection, rejection of everything I had ever known or cared about. It was like my body rejecting my heart in favor of my mind. Religion was killing me, and losing religion was worse.
Two things happened at that point. The first was literature. I found books, in a way that I had never found books before. I had always been a reader, but now I was an unspeakable reading machine, an absolute monster of literary tomes. Unfortunately for literature, in college I decided that intellectual literature was pretty much a crock, and that I could make any book say anything I wanted. Became a deconstructionist, and spent my class time figuring out what the teacher wanted the current selection to say, and writing papers that countered that view.
The other thing was music. Growing up, among my friends and family and community, there were two types of music: Honky-Tonk and gospel. Either you sang it while crying into your beer, or you sang it in church. That was it. Nine Inch Nails crashed into my life like, well, like a very angry god with access to a drum machine. It changed me. It broke me and mixed me up and let me settle. It made me better.
That was almost sixteen years ago. Kee-rist, I'm old. But sixteen years is a long time, and people change. I've changed. I'm stable now, I'm solid and secure. I'm still a ninja reader, though less of a deconstructionist and more of a writer. I've gotten past a lot of my personal broken-ness, patched up the little things that seemed like big things, back then. Gotten over it, gotten through it, moved on.
Anyway. It was a good show. You know who you fucking are? I know. Who I fucking am.
bbkaro:
Well, I guess that's points in Reznor's favor. If he was able to jostle one honky-tonk hillbilly loose from the hooks of sermonizing, then I'll stop publicly flagellating that shitty Fragile record.