Therewas a Christian NIN called Klank. To kids who loved NIN, these Christians were like, “Yeah, they’re cool, but check these guys out: they talk about God.” It was a weird parallel world.
I started opening my mind, asking, What is heaven? Who is God? And then I retaliated in a really angry way. That’s when NIN hit me the hardest. I started finally realizing I was an all right guy. First I was angry at everybody, then it turned into absolute hatred toward God, toward religion, and the church. “Hey God, why are you doing this to me?/Am I not living up to what I’m supposed to be?” I think if anybody in the universe were going to feel what Trent was saying there, it would be me.
At first I felt alone because I had been trying so hard and still failed God. Then I felt like I turned my back on God, and my friends thought I was crazy. I was an outcast. But I think that through listening to
PHM, The Fragile
, and
Broken
, I really felt like, There’s somebody else who’s been through this, and that I wasn’t so strange for being so angry. After that, it was a process of self-repair. I said, I’m going to live by my morals, which my mom and dad instilled in me before they split. NIN was the main rebuilding influence. Trent felt the same way, and music was his way of venting. Songs like “Heresy” and “Happiness in Slavery” were his ways of dealing with it.
The day I stopped believing in God was the day I bought
The Fragile
. I was 18 and dating this girl who was a supreme born-again Christian. Her family was 10,000 times worse than mine. They thought she was this princess of heaven and I was this bum. We battled throughout our year-and-a-half relationship because she said I was not as good of a Christian as I thought.
She went on this summer mission trip to Israel. When she returned, I went to the airport with her family to pickher up, and she was ice to me. She gave me a four-page letter of all the things I had to do if we were going to be together, like becoming a stronger Christian. I got home and cried. After a couple of weeks, she started being into me again, but then I found out that while she was on the trip, she had been hooking up with some guy. I went to her house and said, “If you have anything else to tell me about what happened between the two of you, you’d better let me know right now, because you will never speak to me again.”
That day I had bought
The Fragile
. After I put it on, and by the time “We’re in This Together Now” came on, I was not a Christian. “It’s funny how everything you swore would never change is different now.” It was like all of a sudden my room collapsed in on me, but then there was somebody there pulling me out. And it was Trent Reznor. The next day, I was at a friend’s house playing video games, something I was previously forbidden to do. I had been in a coma, and I just woke up.
I think after
The Fragile
, which is my
The Wall
, I really began to love NIN as a whole. I saw NIN live and they started with “Terrible Lie,” so I went back to rediscover
PHM
. I remember when I first heard it, I liked that I didn’t know what was going on. I liked listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and knowing there was a bass player, guitarist, singer, and drummer. With NIN, I was like, How will the live show be? Is there going to be a guy rattling a box of chains, another with a trumpet, and someone with a garbage lid? At the time I was also listening to Nirvana’s
Nevermind
and all these formulaic radio and MTV rock bands. NIN was something completely different.
My friend Jason and I were known for sneaking out at parties. We used to sit in his car and listen to this NIN mixtape. We’d stare at the stars and have long conversations about what we thought
The Fragile
was about. “Something ICan Never Have” was huge to us. It was that phrase: “I just want something I can never have.” How brutally honest is that? What kind of person can admit
I started opening my mind, asking, What is heaven? Who is God? And then I retaliated in a really angry way. That’s when NIN hit me the hardest. I started finally realizing I was an all right guy. First I was angry at everybody, then it turned into absolute hatred toward God, toward religion, and the church. “Hey God, why are you doing this to me?/Am I not living up to what I’m supposed to be?” I think if anybody in the universe were going to feel what Trent was saying there, it would be me.
At first I felt alone because I had been trying so hard and still failed God. Then I felt like I turned my back on God, and my friends thought I was crazy. I was an outcast. But I think that through listening to
PHM, The Fragile
, and
Broken
, I really felt like, There’s somebody else who’s been through this, and that I wasn’t so strange for being so angry. After that, it was a process of self-repair. I said, I’m going to live by my morals, which my mom and dad instilled in me before they split. NIN was the main rebuilding influence. Trent felt the same way, and music was his way of venting. Songs like “Heresy” and “Happiness in Slavery” were his ways of dealing with it.
The day I stopped believing in God was the day I bought
The Fragile
. I was 18 and dating this girl who was a supreme born-again Christian. Her family was 10,000 times worse than mine. They thought she was this princess of heaven and I was this bum. We battled throughout our year-and-a-half relationship because she said I was not as good of a Christian as I thought.
She went on this summer mission trip to Israel. When she returned, I went to the airport with her family to pickher up, and she was ice to me. She gave me a four-page letter of all the things I had to do if we were going to be together, like becoming a stronger Christian. I got home and cried. After a couple of weeks, she started being into me again, but then I found out that while she was on the trip, she had been hooking up with some guy. I went to her house and said, “If you have anything else to tell me about what happened between the two of you, you’d better let me know right now, because you will never speak to me again.”
That day I had bought
The Fragile
. After I put it on, and by the time “We’re in This Together Now” came on, I was not a Christian. “It’s funny how everything you swore would never change is different now.” It was like all of a sudden my room collapsed in on me, but then there was somebody there pulling me out. And it was Trent Reznor. The next day, I was at a friend’s house playing video games, something I was previously forbidden to do. I had been in a coma, and I just woke up.
I think after
The Fragile
, which is my
The Wall
, I really began to love NIN as a whole. I saw NIN live and they started with “Terrible Lie,” so I went back to rediscover
PHM
. I remember when I first heard it, I liked that I didn’t know what was going on. I liked listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and knowing there was a bass player, guitarist, singer, and drummer. With NIN, I was like, How will the live show be? Is there going to be a guy rattling a box of chains, another with a trumpet, and someone with a garbage lid? At the time I was also listening to Nirvana’s
Nevermind
and all these formulaic radio and MTV rock bands. NIN was something completely different.
My friend Jason and I were known for sneaking out at parties. We used to sit in his car and listen to this NIN mixtape. We’d stare at the stars and have long conversations about what we thought
The Fragile
was about. “Something ICan Never Have” was huge to us. It was that phrase: “I just want something I can never have.” How brutally honest is that? What kind of person can admit
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