‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I”. This is what we must yield up to God.’

— Simone Weil

‘God break down the door
You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for.’

— Nine Inch Nails

Photosensitivity warning: Many of the hyperlinks in this essay go to live videos, which feature a strobe light.

I was 10 years old when The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails was released in 1994, and I listened to it more than any other record for the next six years, when everything I knew about myself was disintegrating and becoming unknowable. It lives in my blood memory, the soundtrack to the most formative part of my life. When I think of that time, my memories resonate with those songs, I can’t imagine myself without them, who I would have been. Since then, twenty-five years, I regularly go through periods where the only thing I listen to for weeks, months at a time is Nine Inch Nails, and this locates me, returns me to myself. When you love a band for more than half your life, something happens as their songs come to live in you, they echo through how you remember the past, and fortify how you are legible to yourself in the present.

NIN was the first band that got me in trouble with grown-ups – for this, they have a special place in my heart that no other band will ever touch. For Christmas vacation in 1996, when I was 12, I brought the Broken EP with me when I went to stay with my Catholic grandparents. Broken was packaged in a cardboard ‘digipak’, so my grandmother, rather than struggle with a plastic jewel case, could open it like a book. The lyrics were printed on the inside, though I was singing them aloud all the time too. I think Grandma had the biggest problem with my favourite lyric – ‘Gotta listen to your big-time, hard-line, bad-luck, fist fuck’ – but there was enough offensive sentiment on that record to compel her to gather my family for an intervention. They asked me how I could listen to this violent, raging, blasphemous music. My answer, ‘Because I like it,’ still seems to be the best response to such a question.

The ‘Closer’ video also got me in trouble. It was rarely played on MTV, and since these were the days before YouTubing could satiate fan cravings, I lived in constant, nervous hope that I’d be lucky enough to catch one of its late-night airings, maybe even be able to record it on VHS. One night I did get lucky, but I was at a sleepover birthday party, with giggling girls in pyjama shorts. We were 13, maybe 14 years old. The TV was playing in the background. That electronic beat came on – dum, fft! dum, fft! – animating, via air through tubes, the raw pig heart nailed to the Cherner chair. I squealed, turned up the volume, and sat six inches from the screen. I sang along, knew every word. ‘I wanna fuck you like an animal / I wanna feel you from the inside / I wanna fuck you like an animal / My whole existence is flawed / You get me closer to God.’ I clapped when Trent Reznor, his aquiline profile in silhouette, licked that strange, vintage microphone that looked at once phallic and mammillary. When the shots of him bound and blindfolded came on during the second chorus, I remember swooning and sighing, as if I were watching a boy band. No one joined me. They all hung back. I can imagine this scene now, how they saw me, a person lonely and young and singing to herself, leaning in to that bizarre world on the screen, with its spinning eggs and crucified monkey and apple-mouthed pig and split-open nautilus, the world that summoned something powerful and fundamental in me and told me that, although I felt like it, I was not world-less. Even if the world I’d lived in so far, the very world of this generic, bland, teenaged living room, had been deserted and companionless for me, the world of that video promised that, somewhere, there were people who saw visions like mine, full of nihilism and perversions but also twisted beauty, a kind of gracefulness in all the shit. The birthday girl’s parents called my parents, expressing concern, and banned me from coming over again.

I saved up to buy the VHS tour documentary for The Self Destruct Tour, called Closure, which was released in 1997, when I was 13. It was the first VHS tape I ever owned, and what it contained, what it revealed, about this band felt like I’d discovered the Gnostic Gospels. The grainy image storms with brown light and shadows, and the music they play, on a stage draped in shrouds and scrolls of loose cassette tape, is brutal and desperate. The band destroy their instruments, each other, and themselves. Keyboards are stomped on until the keys look like ribs that have been cracked off their spines. Multiple band members get injured: Trent throws a microphone stand that lands on the drummer’s head, and, with blood pouring into his eyes, the guy keeps playing. The crowd doesn’t just mosh, it tears itself apart, punching each other, crowd-surfing, and clawing their way toward the stage. They grab for Trent while bouncers fight them off. Trent sneers back, ‘Whoever threw that, fuck you.’ It looked like the most exciting live show imaginable. I’d dream of it sitting in class, while the teacher droned on about the quadratic equation. I’d wonder what it felt like to be in that crowd, that room drenched in fury and sweat, with those songs, that music, the most explosive noise I’d ever heard. Around this time, I started playing in bands, and I got to learn for myself how good it feels to turn your amps all the way up and scream until your throat breaks. It instilled a belief in me that I still have to this day: that any spiritual ailment can be cured by playing music at maximum volume in a small, dark room.

The behind-the-scenes shots in Closure are even more infamous than the concert footage. They show the band destroying dressing rooms by heaving couches against walls, staggering around hungover in clothes whose rank funk you can practically smell off the screen. They snigger at Midwest gas stations where they shove oranges up their shirts to look like tits, and howl with laughter during a prank call to a sex worker, where they ask her to ‘Tell me you wanna fuck my nine inch nail’. I remember that there was a lot of ass and genitals on display, most of it male. Jim Rose’s Circus, a BDSM freak show, was one of the opening acts, and we watch one of the performers backstage try to lift an armchair that’s hooked to his limp dick. Marilyn Manson, another opening act, is young and lean and impish, sitting next to a pair of strippers with a look of inebriated glee on his lipstick-smeared face. Buzz Osborne of Melvins is persuaded by a drunken mob of band members to throw a lamp at an EXIT sign that is dripping with beer (this lives on in Tumblr gifsets entitled ‘Buzz, et. al., versus EXIT sign’). NIN begin the tour playing small theatres, and end, two years later, in arenas. Lou Reed comes backstage after a show and says, ‘It was so smart, it was just so fucking smart.’ There is the terrific version of ‘Hurt’ sung with David Bowie and the notorious, mud-covered Woodstock ’94 performance. This was the tour where they wore black leather and latex covered in cornstarch, and Trent was in short-shorts with garters, dripping in sweat and blood. He careens around the stage, jerking off his microphone stand, and knocking over his bandmates by roping his mic cable around their feet, or sometimes just outright tackling them.

Some of the most exhilarating scenes – not only in Closure but in most of their live videos from the tours of the 1990s – show how Trent particularly enjoys attacking the lead guitarist, Robin Finck. Trent gropes him, leaps on him, twists him to the ground, shoves him off the stage into the surging crowd, and if it’s not a tackle, it’s an erotically menacing embrace of an arm around Robin’s head, bending his neck back and stroking his forehead, or pushing up against him from behind. On YouTube, there are several fan-made compilations, with titles like ‘Trent Reznor vs. Robin Finck (Part 1)’, that give a sense. There is also a sequence on Closure’s ‘bonus materials’ where a nearly-naked Marilyn Manson appears onstage and shoves Trent to the ground while kissing him. Along with the ‘Closer’ video, these scenes constructed a world where sex converged with rage, encapsulating the turgid passions of puberty in a way that no other band at the time did. Gruff, melancholic Pearl Jam could not get close to the feeling that being inside the belly of the beast of lust is warm and wet but also suffocating. More than anything else in his repertoire, Trent has had to account for these boiling, carnal eruptions in interviews. (‘I don’t walk around throwing mic stands when I’m eating dinner,’ he pointed out in an interview with MuchMusic.) In 1995, at age 11, I remember reading a particularly lurid article in the magazine Details, which bloomed in my fantasies for years after. The interviewer asks Trent the five words he associates with sex. Trent replies, ‘Taste, sweat, lick, come, bite,’ and is then asked if he’s into masochism and whether he associates sex with pain. He says yes. As I would experience in the next few years – making out awkwardly in closets and cars, bumping teeth and wincing at too-long fingernails, not to mention being confronted with the banal brutality of young desire – not only were sex and pain linked, but they felt like the same thing. Masochism was not a choice or a kink. It was how sex felt all the time. All you could do was submit. This was especially compounded for someone, as I was, assigned female at birth. Growing up, I was told not just by adults, but by so many depictions of erotic love in movies and TV, that if a boy called you names, insulted you, ignored you, and even (or especially) when he hit you, it was because he liked you. To be wanted was to suffer. And to want was to be monstrous.

The lyrics of Nine Inch Nails, so simple and vulnerable in their angst, in their need, in their defeat, offered articulation and insight into this rough new world. They were embarrassing as hell to sing along to – so bald and filthy! so corny! – but that’s exactly what made them meaningful. They explained the stuff that embarrassed you, gave it shape, cause, and expression, and validated it as true. In that same interview from 1995, Trent says, ‘Every day I’m saying the most personal thing I could ever say… But one of the prices is that there’s an open raw nerve that I’m letting everybody look at. There’s a hole in the back of my pants with a bare asshole showing, and you can see right in there. And sometimes I wish I hadn’t.’ Here, he could be describing having to endure one day of high school when you’ve got a crush on someone who doesn’t know you exist and you’ve just gathered your courage to say hi. NIN was the perfect band, especially for a goth, for an adolescence of gender confusion and the violence of craving. Lain over the harsh, wrathful quality of the music, you could scream and thrash and flail around to the huge sounds, but still be talking about how small you felt. I remember so many days of shuffling through the hallway at school, chewing my own tongue, my body crawling with thirst, and my only relief would come when I got home after school and cranked NIN up on my Walkman. It was transcendent in a basic way that I’ve never experienced since. As an adult I listen to a lot of hardcore, metal, and noise – bands that make angry, desolating music about being angry and desolated – but I keep returning to NIN precisely because of those naked lyrics about want. Let’s be real: you can’t sing along to Merzbow.

Along with satisfying the untamed needs born in that vortex of sex and rage, one of the reasons I’m so unabashedly a NIN fan, and have been for so long, is because they’ve never humiliated me as they’ve gone through the years, like nearly every other mainstream band I loved growing up in the 1990s. I can declare my love for them without having to suffer the scorn that so many of those bands now deserve for selling out in various, pathetic ways. Indeed, it’s recently felt as though all these years of cult devotion are being validated in a populist way, as NIN re-emerged in the late 2010s as a singular bastion of uncompromising artistic vision, the last men standing. Billboard recently declared us to be in the midst of a ‘Reznorssance’. After winning the Oscar for Best Score for The Social Network, and going on to score Waves, Watchmen, and the new Pixar film Soul, a meme went around stating that ‘From now on all good movies will be scored by NIN.’ The band appeared, as ‘The’ Nine Inch Nails, in the new Twin Peaks, and they looked and sounded fucking amazing. Miley Cyrus sang a warped version of ‘Head Like a Hole’ on Black Mirror, turning it into a capitalist nightmare of so-called feminist empowerment, which Reznor celebrated by releasing a T-shirt with the hilariously uncanny lyrics: ‘Head like a hole! I’m on a roll! Riding so high! Achieving my goals!’ At the end of the episode, Miley sang the real lyrics, which were as clarifying and articulate in 2019 as they were in 1989. The many years where the band’s popularity receded from mainstream success are now seen as evidence of their integrity. NIN has always foregrounded politics, not only before it became cool and trendy to do so, but at a time when it was likely to harm one’s career. During the record-industry crisis brought on by the internet – the one that made many artists turn into assholes whining about their bank accounts – Reznor released a new record, not as a pay-what-you-want download, but for free, saying, ‘This one is on me.’ When NIN won the Webby award for it, Trent’s entire speech was, ‘Wait. We didn’t charge anything.’ Last week, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, they released two new albums for free, with a statement that read, ‘It made us feel better to make these and it feels good to share them. Music has always had a way of making us feel a little less alone in the world… and hopefully it does for you, too. Remember, everyone is in this thing together and this too shall pass.’ After the 2016 US election, Trent declared that if you voted for Trump, he didn’t want you at a NIN concert, and during NIN’s world tour of 2017-18, while playing outside of the States, he consistently apologised for his country. ‘Please, forgive us,’ he said. This during the same year the Smashing Pumpkins staged a ‘reunion tour’ where Billy Corgan monologued every night that he didn’t care who you voted for, what mattered most was that you were here – or, in other words, that you liked his band.

Beyond politics, something elemental about what NIN did for me as a kid has remained central to who I am as an adult. My precious VHS of Closure and the band it depicted represented everything I wanted, and still want, the world to be: chaotic, feverish, ungovernable. It had the power (maybe not literally, although it was thrilling to think so) to blow up the walls around me, the ones that kept me inside those bland generic rooms, lorded over by lifeless adults who insisted I obey rules that had no meaning beyond control. Watching Closure as an adult cracks me up with its childishness, how adolescent all those boys are, snickering at their dicks out and their rowdy tantrums. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some nostalgia.

Adulthood has sobered me on the actual political impact of rebelliousness. I know that flipping off cop cars doesn’t actually do anything to dismantle oppression, but it sure as fuck still feels good. It will always thrill me to shout ‘Fuck you!’ to teachers, parents, bosses. To spit on the door of a bank, to crush a cigarette into the face on a politician’s sign. What a feeling of liberation to go to my high-school campus on a weekend and piss on the office door of the chemistry teacher who was giving me a D-. When I see young goths and punks sitting in piles of each other outside drugstores, smoking their clove cigarettes in their Dr. Martens and writing lyrics on their fragile skin in ballpoint pen, I will always smile and nod and want to lean over and tell them to try to stay romantic about all that acrimony for as long as they can, because the romance of it is what will help the most.

NIN is the purest expression of fury in music that I’ve experienced, and I love them most for how they femme-ed it, made it queer. It wasn’t just that they wore lipstick while they broke themselves. It was the excruciating nakedness of the lyrics paired with the visceral embodiment of their performance. Though their performances proposed the body as something to hope to transcend, they only revealed and articulated this hope as false. Such transcendence was not, in fact, possible: the body was not something from which you could escape, you’ll always have to drag it along behind you. Rather than this feeling like a punishment, however, a live NIN show was a testament to the fact that this embodiment could still feel enraptured, generative, even mystical.

This is because NIN is the band who most corroborate the fact that there can be a mysticism of fury. There are different kinds of mysticism, but all are primarily defined in terms of ecstasy, which comes from the Greek ekstasis, ek meaning ‘out’ and stasis meaning ‘stand’. Ecstasy is the standing outside of oneself, an experience that requires a total transformation of self, one that also transforms where (and through what) it can stand. We usually understand ecstasy as being conjoined with joy, affording an escape by catapulting you in sweet relief outside of your confining, earthly body of pain and frustration. But ecstasy can also be understood in terms of fury, rooted within, and because of, the bounds of your own skin. From this place, and only ever bound to it, implosive rather than explosive, fury mutates those bonds. Think of being throttled with rage: how your body shimmers with it, how you are changed. Think of the Furies, the ancient goddesses of vengeance and justice (which is where we get the word; the Romans invented it to translate the Greek name Erinyes), who are prescribed by their transformations: when an injustice occurs, they morph into human-shaped birds with blood shooting out of their eyes. They torment the perpetrator, shrieking at him, until he is brought to justice, and then they shape-shift again, this time into mourning old women, cloaked and heavy with despair at the fact that they’ve had to metamorphosise at all. Crucially, the centripetal collapse of fury, its core and border within the body itself, can be understood both as feminine and subordinate, because the oppressed – women, slaves, the disabled – have historically been equated with the body, reducible to and by it. Rage at such bondage is both liberation and limitation. Like the Furies, what fury produces is catharsis, a totalising change, but the thing that is altered is not the external world itself, but the bodies of those who are most affected by that world’s perfidy.

Fury can never be asked for more than what it is at its most pure – and the same could be said of joy. Both are primordial, basic materials, the raw stuff of life. Depending on your worldview, either one or the other is what’s required to first kindle anything at all. Obviously, I’m of the mind that fury is the OG ingredient. To begin anything we need a spark, a flame, a big bang, a fist punching through a wall. Although joy extends outward (to stand outside of one’s self), fury expands what is interior. It tunnels into the deepest redoubt of your being, excavating a violent, primordial place made of need and want. A definition of fury could be that it is the near-unbearable reckoning with how you didn’t get what you needed or wanted. This, necessarily, must take place at your tender, wounded pith, which means that the transformation fury offers, though it uncovers an infinite space within yourself, stops at the edges of your own skin. NIN’s fury, especially onstage, reaches this limit quickly. It produces a storm of ferocity, throwing the band members against themselves and the crowd, hurling the music forward in rapture and rupture. But if this storm was all their performance contained, the band would not be as powerfully purgative as they are. If they began and ended at fury only, the transcendent capacity delivered at a NIN show would stay grounded within the material perimeter of the body, circumscribing how lonely it is to live there, that place, that thing, which is all, in the end, that one has. But it doesn’t stop at this – because NIN has, as its touring guitarist, an actual ecstatic mystic on their stage: Robin Finck.

Robin Finck. He is the biggest reason I am a NIN fan, but he is also something more, someone I’ve followed for 25 years, who has shown me the way to places I never thought existed, let alone imagined that I’d one day go to. It’s not enough to say that he is my favourite guitar player, or one of the first rock stars who I wanted to be. What he’s revealed to me has felt less like a veneration and closer to a kind of communion with another world. First it was how he looked, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, not entirely man, or woman, and which revealed the way to a world beyond gender and the regime it imposes on the body – making his kind of ecstasy the sort that stands outside. As a dreamy queer kid on the brink of puberty, such a guide was life-changing and life-saving. But then, it was so much more: it was how he played his instrument, which is signatory for its refusal to conform to the context in which he exists, and his performance while playing, whose fundamental characteristic is of someone with bottomless presence who is also entirely gone from this world. He is the strangest guitarist I can think of, not because his style of playing is the strangest, but because of the choices he makes for the kinds of stages he plays on. What he does – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, what he refuses to do – produces a kind of radical negation of presence. Such a negation deviates from the world of rock, which is almost ontologically about the exaltation of the performers’ presence. Robin never does what you think he will, what you’d expect from someone in his place. Robin’s also the strangest celebrity I can think of: he’s played on some of the biggest stages in the world with NIN, and for a decade as Slash’s replacement in Guns N’ Roses, but his career is a demonstration of the refusal of celebrity. He’s given only a handful of interviews in twenty-five years – the first on-camera interview focusing on only him just appeared in 2018 – and when he does speak, he is extremely self-effacing. When asked to introduce himself in a feature on NIN, he said, ‘I’m Robin Finck, one of the guitarists in Nine Inch Nails.’ This, from the guitarist in Nine Inch Nails. (There