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Eh, to me the lyrics are what make NIN hard to deal with as a grown adult. Meanwhile Ruiner (Version) remains the best song they ever did. Charlie Clouser's pr

Eh, to me the lyrics are what make NIN hard to deal with as a grown adult. Meanwhile Ruiner (Version) remains the best song they ever did. Charlie Clouser's production was unparalleled at the time in the rock/industrial arena. So clean, so meticulous, it was life-changing. Over in the electronic space there were a few psytrance artists doing similar stuff, but I feel like that style of production only bubbled up into mainstream pop in the 2000s (think Britney Spears - Piece of Me). Nowadays most everything sounds just as pristine, but that just goes to show how well a track like Ruiner holds up. The opening 2 minutes still send a shiver down my spine - they're perfection! I think that's why the TDS/FDTS era of NIN is remembered so fondly - because it's the brief period where some of their stuff sounded ahead of its time.

erikerikson 2y ago
The sonic cleanliness of NIN is absolutely one of the things that I love and I agree that PHM was raw compared to a far more refined TDS and what follows. The intentional arrangement or emphasis of sounds so that you do or don't have to deconflict and separate them increases the emotional and psychological fabric of the music immensely. This makes me think of a past friend who kind of blew my mind by reporting and then insisting (when I struggled to believe) that he didn't really listen to the words in music and sometimes didn't even hear them. I totally appreciate that many people experience music almost exclusively as a tonal experience and it's fascinating to me. Music can be great on that level. I can't separate it and appreciate a song that has more thoroughly attended to more of my dimensions. Songs that satisfy that cleanliness only tonally seem incomplete and far less satisfying down to jarring. Examples of that end of the spectrum include happy songs about domestic violence that don't also punch with irony, where it's like they haven't figured out what an abusive existence they describe. I get the importance of sending telegrams from experiences we have had but too often it feels like they're going to be heard in ways that subconsciously replicate ala meme theory (at least what I know of the academic form). For me, music is an assemblage of the aural, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and surely more as a form of compressed communication. My favorite songs sound incredible while arranging every piece you reasonably need to assemble some pinnacle thought or understanding. A very grand-in-scope example is Pink Floyd's (actually written by Polly Samson) High Hopes which discusses social and economic dynamics. I heard it later in life and it is of a much different sound but satisfies the same passionate desire in me. Another includes Bjork's Mutual Core discussing the challenges of navigating the paradoxes of individual agency within romantic unions under differences of being and definition. These and those like them each seem like someone who has done the work to drill into multi-dimensional clarity and done the work to share it in a way that reinforces and works to elevate humanity. Sorry to carry on so but thank you for stimulating this one.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I bought hundreds, and even still today I continue to buy digital music, "crate digging" on Bandcamp for hours. But I don't really listen to the words, I find they often interfere with what the raw emotion of the music would have been without them. I mentioned psytrance, and that's an example of a genre that is largely instrumental, but when they do include a vocal sample, it's invariably some kind of vapid nonsense about taking drugs, and to me - unless the song is deliberately silly - that often undermines the impact of what the music was saying on its own. I don't buy the idea that vocals are necessary for communication, because otherwise nobody would ever listen to lyrical music in a language they don't understand, except people do and it's very popular. I often prefer to listen to music in a language I don't understand, if anyway I am forced to listen to vocal music, since then I can just enjoy the sounds in their own right. The human voice is a very versatile instrument and can make some really cool sounds. (NIN tie-in: I think The Becoming is one of their best vocals-forward songs, not because of the lyrics, but because the choice of syllables in certain sections is very musical: e.g. "me that you know" is soft and open, but then "had some second thoughts" transitions into harder syllables, followed sharp explosions of "scabs" and "sore" in the next line. The sound communicates more than the lyric.) (Edit 1 hour later because I realize I forgot the best part: the final "me that you know" is followed up with "made up of wires", while "scabs" and "sore" have been replaced with "with" and "away". Musically, there is a progression from the call-and-response "eee aaa ooo ohh? suh! suh! suh!" to "eee aaa ooo ohh? wuh, wuh, wuh..." The sharp "S" sounds evoke the imagery of close and present danger, a rattlesnake or steam/gas leaking under pressure, whereas the "W" sounds are more distant, like a bird flying overhead or the rhythmic thrum of a fan. For me this emphasizes the sense of something kind of becoming weaker and smaller before the eventual transformation at the end of the song. Thus vocals help create a thematic progression even without the lyrical context.) But I also think that treating music like an ideal form of communication is a bit of an elitist perspective. There are some artists who get upset when people don't get the message that they are trying to convey, but I think most artists understand that the act of releasing a work to the public means they no longer have control over it. People are going to interpret the work however they want, they will weave it into the narrative of their own lives and make it into something different and unexpected and that's actually the beauty of sharing art in the first place - it enriches everybody. I think the problem comes from gatekeeper-like fans who imagine that the original intent of the artist is pure and sacred and anyone who is interprets it differently is a lesser fan, unworthy of the gift that was bestowed upon them. I think this kind of framing is unproductive, since to me all art is communal and ephemeral and if it's not being shared to elevate the collective conscious then what was the point to share it at all? People don't need to listen to music to wallow in someone else's ego trip, then they could just go to work, or watch the news, or whatever.
erikerikson 2y ago
And thanks and sharing. As I got into what I wrote and decided I wanted to express, I got pretty far from responding to what you wrote. Sorry for that and still, thank you.
Frederation 2y ago
Same. I appreciate his music style and vibe but his lyrics, not so much..

erikerikson 2y ago

The sonic cleanliness of NIN is absolutely one of the things that I love and I agree that PHM was raw compared to a far more refined TDS and what follows. The intentional arrangement or emphasis of sounds so that you do or don't have to deconflict and separate them increases the emotional and psychological fabric of the music immensely. This makes me think of a past friend who kind of blew my mind by reporting and then insisting (when I struggled to believe) that he didn't really listen to the words in music and sometimes didn't even hear them. I totally appreciate that many people experience music almost exclusively as a tonal experience and it's fascinating to me. Music can be great on that level. I can't separate it and appreciate a song that has more thoroughly attended to more of my dimensions. Songs that satisfy that cleanliness only tonally seem incomplete and far less satisfying down to jarring. Examples of that end of the spectrum include happy songs about domestic violence that don't also punch with irony, where it's like they haven't figured out what an abusive existence they describe. I get the importance of sending telegrams from experiences we have had but too often it feels like they're going to be heard in ways that subconsciously replicate ala meme theory (at least what I know of the academic form). For me, music is an assemblage of the aural, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and surely more as a form of compressed communication. My favorite songs sound incredible while arranging every piece you reasonably need to assemble some pinnacle thought or understanding. A very grand-in-scope example is Pink Floyd's (actually written by Polly Samson) High Hopes which discusses social and economic dynamics. I heard it later in life and it is of a much different sound but satisfies the same passionate desire in me. Another includes Bjork's Mutual Core discussing the challenges of navigating the paradoxes of individual agency within romantic unions under differences of being and definition. These and those like them each seem like someone who has done the work to drill into multi-dimensional clarity and done the work to share it in a way that reinforces and works to elevate humanity. Sorry to carry on so but thank you for stimulating this one.

alisonatwork 2y ago
No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I bought hundreds, and even still today I continue to buy digital music, "crate digging" on Bandcamp for hours. But I don't really listen to the words, I find they often interfere with what the raw emotion of the music would have been without them. I mentioned psytrance, and that's an example of a genre that is largely instrumental, but when they do include a vocal sample, it's invariably some kind of vapid nonsense about taking drugs, and to me - unless the song is deliberately silly - that often undermines the impact of what the music was saying on its own. I don't buy the idea that vocals are necessary for communication, because otherwise nobody would ever listen to lyrical music in a language they don't understand, except people do and it's very popular. I often prefer to listen to music in a language I don't understand, if anyway I am forced to listen to vocal music, since then I can just enjoy the sounds in their own right. The human voice is a very versatile instrument and can make some really cool sounds. (NIN tie-in: I think The Becoming is one of their best vocals-forward songs, not because of the lyrics, but because the choice of syllables in certain sections is very musical: e.g. "me that you know" is soft and open, but then "had some second thoughts" transitions into harder syllables, followed sharp explosions of "scabs" and "sore" in the next line. The sound communicates more than the lyric.) (Edit 1 hour later because I realize I forgot the best part: the final "me that you know" is followed up with "made up of wires", while "scabs" and "sore" have been replaced with "with" and "away". Musically, there is a progression from the call-and-response "eee aaa ooo ohh? suh! suh! suh!" to "eee aaa ooo ohh? wuh, wuh, wuh..." The sharp "S" sounds evoke the imagery of close and present danger, a rattlesnake or steam/gas leaking under pressure, whereas the "W" sounds are more distant, like a bird flying overhead or the rhythmic thrum of a fan. For me this emphasizes the sense of something kind of becoming weaker and smaller before the eventual transformation at the end of the song. Thus vocals help create a thematic progression even without the lyrical context.) But I also think that treating music like an ideal form of communication is a bit of an elitist perspective. There are some artists who get upset when people don't get the message that they are trying to convey, but I think most artists understand that the act of releasing a work to the public means they no longer have control over it. People are going to interpret the work however they want, they will weave it into the narrative of their own lives and make it into something different and unexpected and that's actually the beauty of sharing art in the first place - it enriches everybody. I think the problem comes from gatekeeper-like fans who imagine that the original intent of the artist is pure and sacred and anyone who is interprets it differently is a lesser fan, unworthy of the gift that was bestowed upon them. I think this kind of framing is unproductive, since to me all art is communal and ephemeral and if it's not being shared to elevate the collective conscious then what was the point to share it at all? People don't need to listen to music to wallow in someone else's ego trip, then they could just go to work, or watch the news, or whatever.

erikerikson 2y ago

And thanks and sharing. As I got into what I wrote and decided I wanted to express, I got pretty far from responding to what you wrote. Sorry for that and still, thank you.

Frederation 2y ago

Same. I appreciate his music style and vibe but his lyrics, not so much..