Pretty Hate Machine

The nuns wouldn’t let us have binders, but I brought a teal one to school in eighth grade anyway. It was a canvas for the stickers I got my mom to buy me at Hot Topic. In the bottom right-hand corner was my favorite, a shiny silver Nine Inch Nails logo, just like the ones I’d coveted on the tees and cars of teens and twentysomethings for the decade up till then, 1998. Silver and shiny, though, not matte black-and-white, because despite my best goth posturing, I was a 13-year-old girl. My binder was one of the only things I had to display my burgeoning darkness at school, along with my messenger bag covered in flames. And it was important to put out there, you know? The scowl needed further context.

Nine Inch Nails’ logo with the backwards Ns provided that context. It meant anger and sadness and alienation, and that’s what I wanted to say to everyone around me. Though I wasn’t old enough to hear Pretty Hate Machine, the 1989 debut, in its proper moment between New Wave and grunge, I wanted to read Daphne Carr’s 33 1/3 book on the album to revisit what it, The Downward Spiral, and Hot Topic meant to my tweendom. Because it was a lot.

MTV launched M2 in August 1996, just in time for me to be starting junior high. My parents were sending me to Catholic school, and I was bitter. Music was always an interest of mine, rooted in the Depeche Mode and The Smiths that were seared in my brain when I was small, but through this channel I was able to settle into my taste in mainly British bands and male singer-songwriters, Radiohead and Jeff Buckley chief among them. But Nine Inch Nails was always there, providing something definitive—and admittedly scary. Through the videos, I fell for the skinny, long-haired, tortured Trent in leather gloves. As I felt more and more alienated in this new school, I found solace in identifying with his anger.

Carr writes of her high school experience, “I tried desperately to fit in, until the day I saw the video for ‘Creep.’ It was the best shock.” These videos were vital, providing a very important reminder of the world beyond parents, teachers, insipid peers. It was how many people came to be fans, to define themselves through fandom. It’s this that Carr attempts to legitimize through the stories of herself, and ten* other Midwest NIN fans. They’re a bunch of white men (Carr notes that diversity was hard to come by), so while I can’t relate to their lived experiences, our intense identification with the music creates common ground.

By presenting the histories without comment, framed by the tracks on the album, Carr creates a space free of judgment. Because of this, even when one young man talks about being a misogynist for a long time, I didn’t feel the need to roll my eyes. I understood his suffering and that it has to manifest any way it can. Growth is what’s important, and despite the adolescent nature of most of his lyrics, Reznor helps people work through their shit—especially the very young—by being incredibly direct.

Many of the fans recall an anguished relationship with Christianity, something I could relate to immediately. As Greg from Cleveland, who went to Catholic school, said:

“It’s tough to be a teenager and not have doubts. I love ‘Why?,’ and religion is the ultimate ‘Because I said so.’”

Trent doesn’t pretend to have answers, but in his fuck-yous to those who wield power he gives you space to feel the same.

But without Hot Topic allowing me to consume the Nine Inch Nails brand materially as well as musically, would I have become so attached? I don’t know. Carr gives the the suburban mall staple the cultural theory treatment toward the end of the book. In the same way that she respects fandom as self-expression, she acknowledges that to consume is valid.

Critics of consumer culture—from Herbert Marcuse to The Baffler—often ignore these basic facts: shopping is necessary for survival, it can be pleasurable, and material goods shape and articulate personal identity and thus supply the imagination with much needed stimulus.

M2, in its amazing initial form, died as I was starting high school in 1999, and so did, for the most part, my need for Nine Inch Nails to provide the framework of my identity. I don’t think my fandom was immature, though; it was an important formative moment, and Carr’s 33 1/3 perfectly captures both Nine Inch Nails’ fandom specifically and the universal experience of over-identifying with a musician. And considering I wear Dr. Martens almost every day, I guess I’ve not actually outgrown the influence of Trent or self-defining consumption.