"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." — Banksy
This week at Media Matters, we are celebrating an album which does exactly that. March 8 marks the 20th anniversary of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, a piece of music steeped in sorrow yet charged with cathartic energy.
Fusing elements of industrial rock, techno, and heavy metal, this album is darkly exhilarating and richly atmospheric.
Garnering both acclaim and controversy (especially when references to it were found in the Columbine killers' journals), this record's rich history is certainly worth remembering.
A Dazzling Descent Into Madness
"I wanted to make beautiful surfaces that revealed the visceral rawness of open wounds beneath." Russell Mills' intention behind the cover art for The Downward Spiral perfectly mirrors what frontman Trent Reznor accomplished through its songs — harrowing yet inspiringly honest accounts that remind us of the beauty in revealing one's scars. Outpourings about addiction, alienation, and depression, these songs hit you like private confessions.
The best musicians make stadiums feel like living rooms, and Reznor's confessional songs certainly have that kind of intimate power.
The late writer David Foster Wallace said art provides "one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved." A YouTube user confirmed that notion with this comment regarding one of Reznor's most popular songs, "Hurt," a poignant portrait of drug addiction and alienation.
"I sit solitary and I replay this; I sing along quietly and I drown in my thoughts. But the reason I love it so much is the fact that it gives me so much comfort. I think it's because knowing that someone else wrote it, it makes me feel as if I am not alone."
20 years later, this album maintains that power, and keeps showing new shades of relevance. For example, when I listen to it now, the lyric, "The me that you know is now made up of wires" seems evocative of this digital age in which we're all perpetually plugged-in — power cords to our various electronic devices spreading across our floors like vines in a forest.
I encourage you to unplug, go out, buy this album, and experience it as you would have in 1994 — as a powerful personal journey that connects the particular to the universal, making one man's catharsis your own.
