#453: Nine Inch Nails, 'Pretty Hate Machine'
TVT, 1989
Hello,
It has been a very long time. I have honestly missed you all and I completely understand that my inconsistency is to blame. Don’t worry, this is something I am working at and I am confident that as I keep working at it, I will improve. It is a work in progress, much like all the parts of ourselves.
I’ve taken my sweet, precious time with this album. I wanted to say that I approached this work with care, patience and sensitivity but I just didn’t. I procrastinated it because I have a hard time with music like this. I get it … but I don’t get it. I listen to stuff within the Nine Inch Nails family and I feel annoyed and bored. I become that ditzy rich girl in every 90s high school rom com, with the chunky highlights and the gum chewing, that says stuff like, “Ew, Kyle!” It’s true. This kind of music brings this *slightly sexist* archetype out of me. I don’t hate it but I also do not love it.
It wasn’t until I found out that my friend Megan loves Nine Inch Nails that I started to rethink how I approached this music. Megan is a dancer, creative, kind, beautiful fairy-like woman with a quirky vibe and a great laugh. Yet, she chooses of her own free will to engage in the Nine Inch Nail realm.
Over Instagram messenger, she laid it out like this:
The year is 2019.
I’m working on the Disney-Fox merger.
Working 12-hour days and commuting 3 hours round trip every day (she lived in LA, bad traffic, you get it).
We are all going insane.
And Colin and I are planning the wedding.
I don’t remember the day or reason, but I started listening to NIN during my commutes.
And then I couldn’t stop
Like it was the only thing on loop for months
To the point that Colin saw my Spotify “currently playing” history was never changing.
“Hey, I see you’ve been listening to NIN for 6 months straight. Is everything okay?” - Colin
This story is amazing.
Megan doesn’t type out Nine Inch Nails. She uses NIN. Which is just very cool to me.
She sent me this while I was watching an episode of the Nanny (start at 2:14) where Margaret (the eldest and most clinically WASP of the children in the Sheffield household) is trying to get tickets to Nine Inch Nails.
Needless to say, both Megan and Margaret are tall, white women with M names. They are the same.
But mostly, what attracts these tall M-named females to Nine Inch Nails?
Pent-up rage?
I finally listened to the album. It was much more musical than I thought and more delightful and brain-tingling. There are still moments of “Ew, Kyle” for me but otherwise, it is strong and fun and, dare I say, cathartic.
My favorite thinker in the psychology/trauma world right now is Resmaa Menakem. In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, he writes about clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is the pain we feel from the various traumas and experiences in life. Dirty pain is the pain we feel from not processing/healing our clean pain, it is the pain we experience when trying to avoid the clean pain. It is the pain that can look like furthering abuse, perpetuating that same trauma on others or just perpetuating it within ourselves. It is much messier and more painful. It is trapped trauma magnified.
Therapy, for me, is all about processing that clean pain before I start accumulating dirty pain. I don’t know where Nine Inch Nails is on the clean to dirty pain spectrum (if there is a spectrum), but I think that as a tool, this music can help us process that clean pain saving ourselves from creating a culture of dirty pain around us.
I think that’s the point of Megan’s six-month soundtrack of NIN in LA. I think this is when we find Coheed and Cambria (which the fans obviously also make into an acronym, C&C) or other music that pushes our bodies and brains to slow down and process this clean pain.
I wonder if it’s NINs dirty pain that is enabling our preventing dirty pain in ourselves. Or is this them processing their clean pain?
Clearly, I am not a scholar in trauma but I do know that music in all forms is healing and those feelings that we cannot escape have to be felt eventually. Sometimes, they are felt through Nine Inch Nails on the highway.
I thank God for Nine Inch Nails today. I thank God that there are different sounds for us to listen to and feel through.