Reznor's Side Project A Train-Wreck?

What the hell happened to Trent Reznor? One minute he was the brooding Byronic hero for the MTV generation, spreading gorgeously casual nihilism across the otherwise sterile channels of the music industry across the globe, and now he’s spewing out contrived and unimaginative crap alongside his spouse, whose name has almost completely escaped me, and some other guy that I’ve never even heard of. So much for being objective and doing my goddamn research.


The ‘train wreck’ in question is an EP which was recently released for free download on the band’s website, howtodestroyangels.com, or some crap like that, and has raised all kinds of strange questions about Reznor’s artistic credibility. The problem is that most of his fans revere him as the epitome of an anti-commercial musician, and his ingenious viral marketing and refusal to charge for his music downloads stood as a testament to that. So does the extremely generous gesture of releasing copyright free tracks onto nin.com, which fans are able to take for themselves and create their own remixes. Happy discovery. But the latest Reznor offering has only managed to engender concern amongst his closest fans and followers. Or maybe they just hate his wife, I don’t know.

How To Destroy Angels takes its name from that rather wonderful signal by that old creepy industrial band Coil, who hung around the same kind of dark dingy Gothic ruins as Boyd Rice did, and seems to attempt to pay homage to the track itself through the jarring, discordant riffs and the baying of some crazy-ass machine of groaning cogs and wires in the background- hell, I don’t know what they’d call that in the music industry. Taking a shit on a snare, or something? I don’t know.

 As someone who tries to defend the merits of industrial music in the face of a society almost crippled by its obsession with the same old god-dammed Lady GaGa hooks, I want to exalt Reznor’s EP as a grand offering of mechanical dissonant joy, but the problem is that by rights, it just doesn’t sound like industrial music. Admittedly, nor did Trent’s material as Nine Inch Nails, but his own leathery voice and laborious panting merged with the clanks and whirrs and screams of his music rather brilliantly. The same just doesn’t happen in How to Destroy Angels. Except the opening track. Wait a second, where the hell am I going with this...

The bottom line is that Trent’s churned out something of a howler this time round, and although it’s by no mean the finished product, the quality of the EP itself has cast some doubt over the minds of most industrial fans, mainly because the female vocals make the whole fucking EP sound like some kind of Blondie/NON cross-over. That should be pretty cool, but it How to Destroy Angels is anything to by, it’s not. Nevertheless, if you really want to, you can download the EP here.

Motive-Hunt for Cumbria Killer is Meaningless

Only the morally squeamish and those poor fools striving to uphold some long dead derivative of old world values and chivalry will have anything to gain from sifting through the corpses that lie in Derrick Bird’s wake in search of a motive.

The reality – and one which nearly all institutions will continue to deny, regardless of how many of us take up arms and start murdering our neighbours – is that this rampage was by no means a ‘sick fantasy played’ out in all its brutal physicality by a ‘bloodthirsty freak or lunatic’. The truth is quite the opposite and one which few people are ready to deny. And the more articles that newspapers churn out expressing their total bafflement at a solid motive for Bird’s killing spree, the more likely it is that the true root of the problem will be buried forever under heaps of the usual sensationalist trash.

The whole debacle is to a certain extent reminiscent of the Columbine and Virginia Tech killing sprees – with only one fundamental difference in that whereas Bird seemed to be a happy family man, the college killers were isolated, alienated, frustrated and voiceless. It probably draws people’s minds to the otherwise normal and happy middle aged men who ‘went postal’ during the 80s and walked from cubicle to cubicle, shooting everyone in sight. The grind and the filth and the misery of the life of an average Caucasian male became simply too much. But of course, it was really easy to bracket Seung-Hui Cho and the gang into the bracket of ‘kids brainwashed by Marilyn Manson,’ or ‘impressionable youth corrupted by television’ but that’s just not the case for Derek Bird.

Newspaper editors, and by proxy their readers, seem so fixated upon the importance of indentifying a cause and effect trend in a killer’s background that might point to a motive. This means branding violent video games, films or music as ‘triggers,’ the Ausloeser fuer Gewalt which apparently sparks off every rampage that ever takes place in an institution for young people. But could it be that for a surprisingly large proportion of the population, there is no visible trigger to sudden excesses of extreme violence?

Of course, it’s unlikely that ninety per cent of the population conceal murderous urges. And statistics can tells us (because we oh so adore the refuge of cold figures) that it’s highly unlikely that a rampage like this will occur again in England for a very, very long time. The search for Bird’s motive, then, may not be rising out of moral or legal grounds. If Bird had a motive, then it would of course distance him from the rest of the general population: ‘Sure, poor guy was abused as a child/lost his parents/ was bulled/ was a eunuch, that’s why he did it.’ This desire to distance oneself from the killer seems to be the motive for searching for a motive – people are two terrified to accept that Derrick Bird was a perfectly healthy human being. Just like them.

‘No!’ People will protest, ‘Bird was a monster!’ But the differences between ‘humans’ and monsters are rather superficial, and if normal citizens are able to gas millions of their co-workers, family friends and contemporaries, then the moral transgression towards personally taking out one’s frustration isn’t such a giant leap after all.

Nothing triggered the killing spree – maybe something in the minutiae of his lifestyle brought the killings themselves on – but the actual desire to violently vent his frustration on innocent, well-to-do people would have lain dormant in Bird’s mind for month, maybe years, growing bloated on his disdain for Man and all his grotesque, selfish, narcissistic habits. No one wants to accept that the same aggression just might have been festering in everybody else’s brains too – anybody could have turned out like Bird. It’s not a mathematical formula of cause and effect that defines someone’s desire to start murdering people. It’s a long, slow process of gradual alienation, frustration, loneliness and general feelings of anger that are expressed everyday but thousands of people on the internet, radio, on the TV – it’s the same discourse in a more saleable manifestation.

The End

Anybody who turned up with a head full of sentimental nostalgia, or memories turned palatable and warm over the years, would have been disappointed. In fact, if anything, most people seemed hell-bent upon making sure that the ghastly spectacle of two hundred unrelated students, thrown together by blind luck and perhaps a handful of reluctant common interests, did not become exactly that – the husk of some awful social rite of passage, paraded across Facebook and god knows where else while, presumably, the same perverse ritual was carried out across hundreds of educational institutions across the country. It was.



But there were no sad, chubby children with men’s faces pining wistfully in the background of a photograph and no damp-eyed wretches flitting from clique to clique with a doomsday book of thoughts, or jolts in the brain that resembled thoughts. Nothing but an hour or two, mediocre and anonymous in the sense that those very same gestures were being, had been and would be replicated across the globe thousands of times over, and with each passing occasion it seemed that no statement gained any gravity at all.


There’s the poor cunt with whom you slept/spoke/spat out rumours, and they promise they’ll stay in touch and there seems to be an air of regret/resignation/righteousness about them, but it’s certainly rather bright out here which, it seems, has a habit of dazzling things out of proportion. Of course, they’ll stay in touch, they say. But they won’t.


Nor will you shake hands. I wouldn’t trust those lusty spades, if I were you.