The marriage of heaven and hell

If William Blake were a rock a band, he would sound like Nine Inch Nails.We are inside the Big Dome and I’ve always imagined purgatory to be like this: a huge dark antechamber of metal racks and black scaffolding, with the room filled with souls in black waiting, just waiting. And then come ambient industrial-strength drones followed by the brutal blitzkrieg of guitars, drums and a voice with patented pangs of pain, and off we go. Flew too high and burnt the wing… Lost my faith in everything. This is like a seminar about the power of negative thinking — and how we with worryingly blackened worldview rejoice. Norman Vincent Peale followers would quake in its wake.

Trent Reznor and the present incarnation of Nine Inch Nails are in Manila to perform at the Araneta Coliseum in a concert produced by Splintr as part of the “Wave Goodbye” tour. The guys have been hitting the road with a reformed Jane’s Addiction (with bassist Eric Avery settling differences with frontman Perry Farrell, and no Flea this time), dubbing the tour “NINJA.” (We should get more of good bands here on our shores, and less of those crooners salvaged from the bowels of the ’60s or those from the Idol pap-singer factory. The Cure could have played here after hitting Hong Kong and Singapore, or even Muse and Dream Theater, and what did we get instead? Connie Francis. David Archuleta. We are, indeed, in purgatory.)

So here we are watching Reznor finally in the flesh. The man braces himself with the mic stand with each measured bellow, as if trying to contain or channel a hurricane of dread.

We all remember much of the music, as well as bits and pieces of everything: the singer muddied up in Woodstock ’94; the recording of “The Downward Spiral” at Le Pig Studios at the site of Charles Manson’s gruesome handiwork; that Mark Romanek video for Closer which is a mélange of German Expressionist films, Francis Bacon paintings, and Joel-Peter Witkin photographs, among other things in all their greenish horror; how Trent used to live in a manse in New Orleans with a vampire crypt; how a studio executive famously told him to tone down the anger and make his album sound like that of the Fine Young Cannibals; the friendship and feud with Marilyn Manson, whose album “Antichrist Superstar” Trent produced; the engagement to a Filipina; the Joy Division cover (Dead Souls) for The Crow soundtrack; the challenging but brilliant “Year Zero” concept album which imagines an Orwellian America; the collaboration with David Bowie (two scary monsters making scarily beautiful music together); the Natural Born Killers sound collages Trent made, mixing everything from Patsy Cline to Lard; being a step ahead of everybody in making use of technology to create or distribute music (“The Slip” was ahead of “In Rainbows,” remember?); the legendary tussles with record companies and how he called record distribution “the last strangehold”; Hurt being covered by Johnny Cash, and its composer going to a strip club one night and watching with unease as a stripper gyrated to Hurt.  

Trent Reznor grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, dropped out of college to work as a janitor in a recording studio in the industrial wasteland of Cleveland. When no one was around, the future leader of Nine Inch Nails tinkered with the studio equipment and recorded songs that would eventually end up on “Pretty Hate Machine.”

The rest is blackened history.

Upper Boxes and Downward Spirals

There is an interesting mix of concertgoers. Two friends of mine have forgone Bible study to congregate with us lost sheep, and to listen to a guy sing, “Your God is dead and no one cares.” (Before holier-than-thou readers get their panties in a bunch, let me explain that Reznor is as heretic as, say, Ozzy Osbourne. It’s just a song. So just chill.)

The one who gets beaned by Trent Reznor’s tambourine (hey, that rhymes) is a dear friend of mine. That girl is a rock and roll survivor. When she was in Bangkok to watch Coldplay, a pole hit her on the head and she saw stars — and how they shone for her. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock. If I could just have 20 percent of her musical acumen, I would be a happy man.

Great musicians are here such as Francis Reyes and Jason Caballa. Musicologists Lourd De Veyra and Bert Sulat Jr. also. (Bert could write Tolstoy-like tomes about everyone from the Dead Kennedys to Charice Pempengco, from Holiday in Cambodia to the Dreamgirls medley; and, well, Lourd is Lourd. Lourd deadpans, “Tol, akala ko John Ford Coley concert ’tong pinuntahan ko.”)

I also spot Scott and Therese Garceau. Scott would do a very thorough review of the concert for The STAR’s Sunday Lifestyle. Reese would tell me after the concert how Nine Inch Nails seesawed between hellishly brutal distortions and then heavenly lilting keyboard passages. Exactly: the marriage of heaven and hell. The pendulum swings from the dissonant to the downright melodic.

What is great about Nine Inch Nails is that Reznor’s musical influences (David Bowie’s German trilogy, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” Ministry, Skinny Puppy, This Mortail Coil, and even Velvet Underground) have been amalgamated into something that is solely his own — dark, nightmarish thoughts framed by guitars, synths and almost-danceable beats, sort of like “disco music for serial killers.” Reznor’s preferred theme is timeless and universal: The Fall of Man, The End of Days, How Things Fall Apart, this very deep shit we are mired in. John Milton wrote extensively about it. So did Blake.

Milton, Blake and Reznor know a thing or two about the human condition.

The March of the Pigs could be the soundtrack of our nation. Days later we would find out from the New York Post about this porcine dinner at Le Cirque allegedly costing $20,000 (I did say allegedly). If all the details I’ve read are true, then “inappropriate” as a word doesn’t quite cut it. Most of us Filipinos don’t have an iota of an idea where our next meal is coming from, and then we learn about our leaders feasting like Visigoths after plundering a village. Sickening. But it comforts us a bit how a Palace apologist has justified everything by dismissing it as simply set meals with a choice of “chicken or fiss.” What the? As in fiss feelay? No matter. Money can’t buy salvation for the unrepentantly corrupt. Money can’t even buy good diction. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?

Ah, the Philippines, the Land of Opportunism where anybody could grow up, direct a slew of massacre movies or advise the President on matters of culture, and become a National Artist someday. The country is in shambles and all most congressmen want to do is dance the cha-cha.

That’s why we’re angry, and that’s why we sing along to Nine Inch Nails even if we’re supposedly older and wiser, especially when the older and wiser (and heftier) Trent Reznor yells, “Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die than give you control.”

That’s why the music of Nine Inch Nails is relevant after all these screwed-up years.   

This might be the start of Year Zero all over again.