Nine Inch Nails... Video Anthology

Happy New Year err'body... I hope you're all working on your resolutions, because I'm not. At least so far.

Once again, I don't really have the time to invest in a full post, so I just thought I'd post some more videos. This time, instead of a random video I like, I'll post a few of my idol: Trent Reznor.


 
If you don't like his videos, feel free to tell him. I'm sure he'd like to hear why.

First, let me say something: his videos tend to be a little unconventional. At least, his best ones do, in my opinion. Let's start off with early Trent.

Look at this. Look back at the first picture. Then look at this again.






Trent Reznor started off as a musician in the strange band Exotic Birds. After he left, he began to produce music that I'm a bit more fond of (Thank God). 

Enter "Sin", one of NIN's earliest and most controversial videos. The full video can't be found easily; rather, the incomplete version is the only one publicly available. It is very much NSFW, so I won't embed it here; but if you search for it, it isn't hard to find.
If you didn't watch that one, this characterizes the transition pretty well too: NIN's "Wish", from the album Broken. I like the song quite a bit, though the video looks like a BDSM party. This video is more SFW but I still wouldn't draw attention to yourself watching it if you're sitting next to your boss/grandma/whatever.




Next album, The Downward Spiral. As TR himself said:
"The idea behind the album is of someone who sheds everything around them to a potential nothingness, but through career, religion, relationship, belief and so on. It's less muscle-flexing, though when I started it I didn't know what I wanted it to sound like. I knew I didn't want to be a full metal album, so I tried to address the issue of restraint. It was a long process."
Here's the live video of "Hurt" one of the songs most responsible for NIN's respect...






Another song from the album, "Closer" became infamously popular at the time, due it's being pretty fucked up. I'd say the video is probably NSFW, since there's a naked lady that appears quite a few times. A great song, though some people take it to represent NIN's entire repertoire much more than they should.





One more video; live, kind of: "March of the Pigs". 


He MUST be on something. Or somethings.



Next comes The Fragile, my personal favorite and also the largest of NIN's albums. TR stated:
"The Fragile was an album based a lot in fear, because I was afraid as fuck about what was happening to me. That's why there aren't a lot of lyrics on that record. I couldn't fucking think. An unimaginable amount of effort went into that record in a very unfocused way."
The album doesn't have very many music videos... The video for "We're In This Together" can be found here (embedding was disabled). In addition we have "Into the Void" here... the video is essentially just a long extreme closeup of Trent, but the song is badass so I'll include it anyway:



One of the songs even went onto the soundtrack of a movie you may have heard of:



After a six year hiatus, NIN finally came out with  With_Teeth. The album lacked some of the hard, angry sound that NIN fans had appreciated, so a lot of fans I know were somewhat disappointed; I would say this album marked a change in TR's artistic direction, for sure. The video for my favorite song from the album, "Only":



Not much later, NIN released Year Zero, a concept album focused on a predicted dystopic society plagued by government and religious domination. The album was promoted through a conspiracy-theory-y string of websites, guiding the user through a futuristic mystery that slowly (and not without difficulty) painted the full picture to the user. The wikipedia page on the deal can be found here, and I encourage you to look through some of the sites if you're into that kind of thing... I found it pretty fun at the time, since everything was new and connected with little more than rumors, but it might not have the same appeal now.
The video for "Survivalism":





Later, NIN released the albums Ghosts and The Slip... these albums weren't received too well, by the public or by me. Ghosts was basically an inexpensive, quickly made set of background music... but nothing that contained any real sort of flair or emotion. The Slip was okay, but just seemed tired and uninteresting for the most part. I found a video made for the song "Lights in the Sky", my favorite song from the album; the video is not official, but works nicely with the song anyway, and everybody likes glaciers.





Oh, also a fan-made video for "Discipline" that recognized by NIN and even posted on their website for a while... (lol)





So, there you have it. If you liked what you saw, then you should check out some more of NIN's work, and some of the other videos out there. NIN had a sound full of true emotions and experience, things rare in a business full of charlatans and posers tooling around, pretending to be artists. The music has had a profound effect on my life. I hope you enjoyed the post.

In closing, another little video I found, summarizing TR's career:






::::::EDIT:::::::

I fixed all the videos... You can probably tell, I put the embed codes in "compose" rather than the HTML format, so my bad. I know from now on to check my shit before I publish! I hope you guys can enjoy the videos now.

I should probably also add that the last video doesn't reflect my opinion of NIN or TR at all... I just thought it was pretty funny. And to be honest, I think the song is kind of catchy...

14 comments:

G345t said...

NIN was always awesome.
Also, I can't really see the videos just a bunch of code. Anyone else?

MRanthrope said...

none of the video links worked =/
Copy the embed code in the HTML page perhaps?

Doo said...

I love them!

btw fix your post! go to edit html and put all those codes, in basic compose they just show as code :)

Anonymous said...

Nine Inch Nails is a great band! But I can't see any of the videos!

Innovations said...

i can see all the videos! haha

poelanotex said...

fuck yeah, NIN!

Poetry of the Day said...

such a great anthology, they would be proud

not2bnamed said...

Great post, NIN is an excellent band. Great blog.

M. von Rohmy said...

Love this post. Nice blog :)
R.

Arian said...

NIN is one of my top favorite bands, but some of their videos (specially the older ones) are so-so

Bobby said...

Not my type of music, but I'll check it out.

Don't forget to check and support often your local information hot-spot lifeformation.blogspot.com!

Mr. Rogers said...

that was a pretty long post ^^

D. Consalvi said...

Huge NIN fan. I'm so pissed I didn't get to see them live.

Matthew said...

Haven't listened to NIN for years. Thanks brings back some memories

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