you know me, i hate everyone
Last week was the 30th anniversary of Nine Inch Nails’ broken EP. It was the first EP for the band, and the second major release. It was also the first Nothing Records release alongside Interscope, and the last major release nin had on TVT Records. All of this is important, I swear.
After the commercial and critical success of Pretty Hate Machine, TVT, the first record label to sign the band, pressured Trent Reznor to record a similar album in the hope that it would have similarly successful singles. Steve Gottlieb, CEO of TVT, was insistent that he would not release anything other than an album similar to Pretty Hate Machine. Reznor demanded his label terminate his contract, due to their restriction of his creative control of the Nine Inch Nails project. They ignored his plea. Reznor then objected to the label’s attempted interference with his intellectual property. This heavily publicized feud with TVT led Reznor to use a variety of aliases for the production of what became broken.
Ultimately, Reznor finished the album and presented it to Interscope, making it the debut. Shortly after the album came out, a short film accompaniment started circulating. There were copies personally handed out by Reznor, and each copy had a different defect so he would know who did what, if any got leaked out. The short film was made up of music videos, and MTV refused to play most of them due to the nature.
I first heard broken when I was ten. I was getting into my own music, finding out what I liked and what I didn’t, and finding out that I liked a lot of my parents’ music. I would listen to the CD on repeat for hours. I watched the short film online, on the only site that had it, which was a porn site (Sorry, mom. My therapist tells me I’m okay). It rattled around in my brain alongside all of the punk I was getting into, but always in this different section.
Unlike PHM and The Downward Spiral, which were before and after this, broken was this different beast. It was nothing but aggression and everything sounded like real instruments, which was more “real”, or whatever I thought real meant at that age. Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral were always there when I went through heartbreak, or wanted to impress a girl with “cool love songs”, but broken was there when I thought my parents ruined my life by making us move to Illinois. It was there when I felt like a weirdo and outcast, because none of my peers “understood punk” like I did. This shit was my Taxi Driver, my Fight Club, my insert-white-male-rage-companion before any of those things came into my life.
As I’ve gotten older, mellowed out, and found other things to obsess over, I am always welcomed with open arms by this album. Every time feels as exciting as the first, every goofy memory of screaming a bunch of bad words as a kid in my dad’s car, and all of the mind warping that came with finding out what “fist fuck” meant (Sorry again, mom. I swear my therapist tells me I’m okay). Reznor can score movies, write music for day dreams, have kids, whatever, he will always be a 26 year old trying to die in my heart.
