Up the Hill Downward.
Up the Hill Downward. In the scene where I was sort of eavesdropping into -- my friend was straight up goth, I hung out with him all the time, so I was "in" the goth/industrial scene without actually being "in it." So, to MANY of the people in the "scene" at that time (we're talking people who had been immersed since about 1984-1985) were basically considered "second generation" goths, as the first gen was around '78 to '84 riding through the streets of East Berlin in a trumped up Pathfinder we opened up with lots of assault gear along with with the sudden machine gun stutter of Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Bauhaus, Coil, The Cure, Ministry and Siouxsie and the Banshees, just to name the top groups (in the U.S. scene.) The U.K. had The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim, P.I.L (sort of). But, at least for me, no one out did the out doers, Skinny Puppy. The had all the pomp and circumstance, with the performance art, industrial, but more specifically, actual inarguable "techno goth" music. Plus all the goth Uniforms and face paint. For me, no one out pupped the Puppies. I think I stumbled into the scene, friend in hand, around 1986 or so. So in 1989, when Nine Inch Nails came out, we were three years before that, on the true cusp of dirt and grit gothic punk. NIN were in an instant love/hate relationship with the "scene"; as a person in the "social" part of the scene, NIN was pure commercialized crap. They sounded like what a band would sound like if some pop song producer got ahold of a pseudo industrial band and then filtered them through the "pop machine." So, there was a lot of instant hate for NIN at that time in 89. They were Ronald Regan's pet Industrial Band, not one of the antichrists spewing hate and social recriminations on the other end. However, if you went to some of these peoples homes and hung out in their bedrooms, listening to them play their favorited songs, and if they got up to go do something out of the room AND you snuck into their music crate to flip through their LP's, almost without exception you found at least an EP of NIN, even though they'd swear eternal hatred upon them to the group amassed, all the while reaching dizzying heights with "Terrible Lies" when those synth strings took you over. But then; I was in a strange in-between state where my "goth" street-cred was not put into question because I didn't wear the uniform: all black, Jeanie pants, doc martins, teased up black dyed hair, and, craziest of all to the straights, black eyeliner. To me it was just another social strata identical to the jocks or preppies where; you had to wear this and couldn't wear that, and you had to have these albums but could have those. This was why I had been an outcast at school, I didn't buy into all the manufactured b.s. rules that existed solely in the minds of the zombies who followed them. So in the "goth scene" I was into the "music", not the "scene". If you played me a Bauhaus song I could name the song, name the album, and name which side it was on. Exact same with Skinny Puppy. Never was much of a fan of the Cure. Sorry, to me they sounded more like goth soap commercial jingle music than anything as heavy and artistic as Bauhaus, themselves named after the infamous and still relevant school of architecture from Weimar Germany in 1919, called, duh, The Bauhaus. The Cure had this undeniable happy go lucky pop sensibility in their major hits that all of the others viciously attacked. Their lesser known efforts, like my favorite of theirs, "Faith" were true goth. Goth deserving of a place at the table next to Bauhaus and Coil (with songs like "Dancing at the Funeral Party" just wiping the floor with the silly dilly "Love Cats") I mean, how can you elevate a band that does "Caterpillar" and "Love Cats" to anything more than a pop group grasping desperately to the U.K.'s "Deathrock" scene (later called Gothic Rock or Gothic Punk and finally just plain ole "Goth.") Meanwhile when I mentioned Skinny Puppy's "Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse" to those people even "deep" in the scene they would give me that glazed over look like they had no idea that I was talking about. Especially when I'd pull out the "M:TPI" on them. However, back to the main subject at hand... I was still pretty hot/cold on NIN until I was flipping through cd singles a year or so later and found a NIN single produced by Dave "Rave" Ogilvie! who had been so deep into Skinny Puppy's production they even listed him as a band member on "VIVIsectVI"! That was the "Reptile" remix for the upcoming "Downward Spiral" album which just about killed all the goths because it became this huge hit and you could go to your College campus and hear sorority girls blasting it out of their Volkswagen Rabbits. (Oh, and when they started wearing Doc's... oh shoot... hehe! It all hit the fan then.) So, I liked about a third of the songs on "Downward Spiral," about another third bored me, and a final third I just thought sounded like self absorbed b.s. (Like the brutal "Hurt" which the legendary "man in black" himself, Johnny Cash, along with the Oscar worthy video (for short film?), made that song the theme to Cash's entire career, and entire life for that matter, instead of an "end credits" bit that Reznor whined his way through ("Whine Bitch Wails" was a common term of dis-endearment for him.) at then end of his concerts on the "Downward" tour. But I didn't outright dismiss NIN like other's did. And, when "Se7en" came out with a remix of "Closer" by the kings of actual real "pagans" in goth music, "Coil," then the shit hit the fan. (Apparently it was much more insane for Coil because "Sleazy" [ex-Throbbing Gristle, ex-Psychic TV) had done the remix for a Nine Inch Nails "EP," not for a "movie," and as far as he knew no one he knew gave the greenlight to it being the "opening theme" to a twisted serial killer film. He must have spent the next two hours fuming (shoot, wouldn't you?) Then the overdone, woe is me, dark poetry b.s. Reznor tried to corner the market on began to wear thin and songs and singles and videos like "March Of The Pigs" began to sound more like someone making fun of Industrial as opposed to someone presenting it to the masses. I mean, come on! the piano break in that song, it was pure Charlie Brown Schrodinger. You could see all the kids in the mosh pits doing that Charlie Brown head bop dance. It came to a point where some of the tracks on Janet Jackson's liberating "Rhythm Nation" were more akin to Skinny Puppy and Manufacture than any self indulgent narcissistic song from The Downward Spiral. But we come back out of the "wayback" machine and find Reznor has won not one, but two Oscars for music scores, one from a friggen Disney picture! and one from a movie about geeks ripping off other geeks to become millionaire geeks (never saw it, sounds like crap, never will see it, so there, hehe.) By his third album his music became a revolving door of over produced bleeding heart b.s. with very little salvageable as something approaching a real "good" song. "The Perfect Drug" was astoundingly brilliant, while the rest of the excessive two disc release was just a mish mash of self absorbed synth garbage. A kind of mirror of the L.A. Glam Rock nightmare of Guns n' Roses "Use Your Illusions 1 and 2" (which had an overt nod to Reznor, who "briefly" and disastrously toured with them) with the G 'n' R song, "My World.") Aside: in OKc I saw them and they were, and still are all these years later, the worst firkin band I've ever seen! At that time, the somewhat "self indulgent" Smashing Pumpkins were the opening act, and all the numbskulls in Okc booed them off the stage before they could even play a single song! They said something about "it must get lonely out here with all the cows, and the sheep," funny, hehe, yeah, if you weren't so self absorbed and took a look around your arena to see a large downtown with skyscrapers, a genuine "canyon" as they call it, and in the top of the top cities when it comes to population of the metropolitan area. Either way, they played a song where they chanted "f-you" over and over as if that was going to have some effect on the crowd. It must be duly noted that the next year when the Pumpkins were headliners their tickets sold out, in the same town, in about 2 hours! Poetically, they should have played the "f-you" song for three minutes and then left! That would have been sublime. As for the last mention of G 'n' R (and Toys 'R' Us) their show consisted of Axel singing a verse, running off stage confusing the hell out of the band and the audience, then appearing for another verse, only to disappear again. WTFF? Worst S**t ever!
Best ever? The Moody Blues (whom my ex's bridesmaid's father actually bought be a ticket "after" he had bought theirs because I went overboard on what a fan I was of theirs. Her father is eternally cool just for that.) The Moody Blues were just the coolest most professional brilliant, not a dead moment music I've ever seen! However, back to Nine Inch Nails (lets face it, basically Trent Reznor) on a solid and unfaltering positive note: the album "With Teeth" solidly blew me away, especially as a soundtrack for my life at the time, living next door to some hyped up PTSD vets who were buying and selling drugs in the apartment next to mine (one time, two of them beat the shtuff out of each other in the parking lot, and called an ambulance so they could get hospital quality pain killers!!!) that album absolutely, and I say this in spite of my problems with Reznor's narcissisms, that album helped keep my brain together during all that. And for that, Reznor gets the keys to my internal city of OZ and a lifetime's supply of "yeah, all right, you're one of the good ones!" for all time! And the concert tour with the ultra unique "TV on the Radio" then "Bauhaus" supporting their then Newest and also Last-est album, and then... f- me sideways, that NIN show with the red light strings hanging around the stage. It was like you liquified my brains and then sucked them out of my ears with an industrial strength vacuum. Sure Front 242 is a live show I'll always treasure, Peter Murphy is an incomparably intimate genius of a musical artist, and no one can beat down my Puppy. But I gotta lay down a wreath of dead roses for the long running NIN, no matter how much one of my synth heroes, Bill Leeb, will always despise him (and be looking out for him to pounce on, hehe.) "Pass a cup to the dead already, hurrah for the next to die." Dracula
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