Changes

Listening to Nine Inch Nails’ music, which is so often called industrial, I actually hear a lot of funk. Just listen to “Closer“[[Closer]],” and the foundation could be Stevie Wonder or George Clinton. But on top of that is a focused and relentless process of emotional destruction, which paints a portrait of pain, pressure, and dissatisfaction. It’s the soundtrack to the dark and lonely party that was beginning to play out in America at that period, so I would call it not industrial, but the sound of industro, digital ambition.

I went to the Nine Inch Nails show at the Forum in Los Angeles—the one together with [[David Bowie—and Bowie]]—and Trent held the center of that room just by being a kind of dark spot hunched behind the mic. I’d seen the same thing accomplished in different ways by T. Rex at Wembley, Nirvana at the Pyramid Club, and Bob Dylan in ’65. This is the mark of the master artist—simply to connect.