For want of a Nail
I’ve always been suspicious of mass movements. I could relate to Groucho Marx’s remark, “I wouldn’t want to be part of any group that would have me as a member.” Face it, mass movements are scary; but oddly, they can be the pathway to a sense of community.
On a rainy Wednesday night, while much of Metro Manila and the country were publicly mourning Cory Aquino, lining up along SLEX and outside Manila Cathedral and in Paranaque to glimpse, however briefly, her coffin en route to a final tribute, we were on our way to catch the industrial band Nine Inch Nails at Araneta Coliseum. Traffic was understandably light: it was declared a national non-working holiday for Cory, and much of the population was paying its respects under yellow umbrellas or watching safely from home on TV.
Araneta Coliseum is a place for mass movements — big crowds, big acoustics, the “Thrilla in Manila” — all of that. Last time we were there was the “Alternative Nation” tour of Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth and Beastie Boys, way back in 1996. They’ve repaired the seats since then. Rock shows are less anarchic now, it must be said. Coke ads, MTV ads (they put on the NIN show, after all), even Dairy Queen ads flash on the screens. Hawkers now sell popcorn and iced tea among the crowd, like at Yankees Stadium. Rock and roll as a sporting event.
A sizeable number of expats were glimpsed down in the “pricy” section of Araneta. A lot of shaved pates, which can be worrisome, in terms of mass movements. It’s possible there is a large “sleeper” community of foreign Nine Inch Nails fans in Metro Manila who only become activated when Trent Reznor, the bulked-up singer/songwriter for the band, decides to tour. This was billed as Reznor’s “Wave Goodbye” tour, possibly his final stretch on the road, and this tied in, coincidentally, with Cory Aquino’s final public viewing before burial.
I don’t want to make too much of it, but perhaps attending a concert of brutal, often beautiful industrial music is a tonic for those who did not attend (or attend to) Cory’s burial yet still feel the need to express some howling message to the heavens nevertheless. There was that familiar tug of overwhelming sound as the band took the stage at 9 p.m. — the hammering assault of guitarist Robin Finck, Reznor chugging away on a Les Paul, his bassist (Beck tour musician Justin Meldal-Johnsen) and drummer (who resembled Animal from The Muppet Show) agitating the stage amid rolls of smoke and fog. People can get swept up in communal noise, whether it’s a chant on the streets or the orchestrated speaker blasts in a sports stadium. Strobe lights completed the orchestration, focusing attention on the moment: Be with us now.
We were watching from stage right, in a loosely guarded upper box from which to better enjoy the industrial-strength pummeling. Reznor has had the fortune (or misfortune) or popularizing a sound that many thought would forever elude popular ears: industrial sludge, laced with pretty vocal melodies and piano motifs, layered over electronic beats borrowed from Iggy Pop and Depeche Mode.
That his sound — culled from Ministry, Skinny Puppy and bits of Throbbing Gristle — would later spawn people like Marilyn Manson and nü-metal bands doesn’t diminish the power and grace of recordings like 1994’s “Downward Spiral.” Reznor carried on, recording with David Bowie (I’m Afraid of Americans) and being covered by Johnny Cash (Hurt). But his moment, it seemed, was sealed in the past.
All that was forgotten as Reznor led this version of NIN through a two-hour show that was almost sanitizing in its brutality, nearly beautiful in its bestiality.
Reznor (reportedly engaged to a Pinay Playboy model, which could explain his sudden desire to tour these shores) gave it his throat-squalling best, delivering all the well-known shouters — Reptile, Closer, March of the Pigs, Wish, The Hand That Feeds, Head Like a Hole — in that trademark soft-LOUD dynamic that has spawned a thousand imitators.
Wearing black and throttling the mike, Reznor knows he has a great catalogue. His well-documented tussles with record companies led him to release his last album, “The Slip,” online as a free download (the band played Echoplex from that album). The tunes may grow same-y after a while, broken up by anthemic choruses and punctuated by strobe light ejaculations, but this is the stuff that rock and roll can only aspire to at this stage of the game. Mid-show Reznor and band mates slowed things down for some acoustic noodling that grew in jagged complexity, electronic keyboards adding splashes of gentle distortion to the smoke-filled air. Few words were spoken, Reznor choosing to let the noise and silence do the talking. In short, NIN were better than we had any reason to expect at this late date, and emphatically musical to boot.
Yet there is that familiar compulsion in me to regard mass euphoria suspiciously. It’s just no longer possible for me to completely buy in to head-nodding and fist-pumping, not even alone in the car with the stereo cranked up. Age does this, but it’s also because I’m not sure I trust the power of rock so readily anymore, as I once did; I’ve seen so much come and go, just as so much has transpired since EDSA 1. I was concerned about my Bible-studying sisters-in-law, whom I spied out the corner of my eye thrashing back and forth to Reznor’s assault like Beavis and Butt-Head in need of an exorcist. We all need catharsis, I guess. Whether it’s a national outpouring over an iconic figure who’s passed away, or the last scream of an indie icon who is not about to go gently into the night, we’re all looking for somebody to enact our pain in a big way. Fittingly, as we all knew he would, NIN finished with an encore of Hurt: “I hurt myself today,” Reznor whimpers, “to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real…” We prayed he would end on this elegiac note, not pummel the crowd further with overemphasis. Better to leave the need still hanging there, in the air. “I will make you hurt,” Reznor told the Manila crowd on the night of Cory’s final goodbye. He kept his promise.
