“Nine Inch Nails: From Hate to Love, an Exploration in Nostalgia and Memory” How is that for a pretentious title? Yeah, well, here we are in the land of memory and bullshittery.
Navigating my memories is like attempting to unravel a Gordian knot. Between glimpses of real memories to false memories in all their fashion from what people told me about their memories of events my brain chemistry decides some things are better left obscured, it is a bit mystifying as to why I decided to start a nostalgia site. What’s probably less mystifying is why it gets so little love in the way of updates. My memory is suspect at best, but, really, isn’t that also kind of what nostalgia is about?
When I think about my childhood as a gamer, it is full of awesome memories. I remember sitting down with my cousin to try to figure out Adventure and Pitfall or the puzzles in King’s Quest or Leisure Suit Larry (including a cheatsheet of answers to bypass the age gate). I remember buying an inordinate amount of graph paper to map out the Bard’s Tale and Might & Magic games as well as a ton of other role-playing games.But when I’ve tried to go back and play some of the games, especially on the Atari 2600, I realize that the nostalgia I feel is not only ephemeral but also most likely a lie.
One of the rare areas where I have a much, much better clarity of memory, though, is with music, and I remember how I was first introduced to Nine Inch Nails, a band that I have loved ever since.
A friend of mine, James, gave me and another friend, Landon, a tape with a bunch of new artists. Someone James knew had sent it from a distant, magical city where musicians were seemingly emerging from the woodwork with demos every day. I do not remember most of the music on the tape, but I do remember “Down In It,” which would be released as a single and then on NIN’s debut album Pretty Hate Machine.
Landon loved it and I hated it, which also shows that Landon was more right than me in a lot of taste-related things. Even though I was a closeted fan of a ton of music, I was very publicly a heavy metal kid, and the drum machine downbeats just didn’t do it for me. Plus, I critiqued at the time that the lead singer (I did not know Trent Reznor’s name then) just couldn’t sing as if judging a mostly spoken word lyrical set for its vocal musicality was even in my wheelhouse. I was a fan of Megadeth and Voivod, so really, who was I to judge people’s singing voices? Plus, closeted-music-me would absolutely adore Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” a year later.
Fast-forward to the next year when Pretty Hate Machine hit the streets and I first started hearing “Head Like a Hole” on MTV. James also gave me a copy of PHM. The statute of limitations has run out on piracy in the late 1980s, right? I loved it. And then, when I heard “Down In It,” I was like, oh yeah, I remember this song!” But, inexplicably, I remembered loving it and it took Landon calling me out on it because we had argued about the qualities of each song on the long-ago and mostly forgotten-by-me tape.
A large number of musical awakenings would shift my tastes in the coming years, but Nine Inch Nails and the music coming out of TVT Records, Wax Trax! and Subpop were instrumental in those changes. And when Faith No More became one of my favorite bands of all time, I also had to admit to others that I was also a rap fan, which was pretty much permadeath to a metal kid like me at the time. Though, to be honest, admitting you liked N.W.A. and other gritty gangsta rap bands at the time was much more accepted than admitting you also dug Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC among the punk and metal crew.
But this little story also supplies a peek into the power of nostalgia and the trickiness of memory. The hipster in me wanted to retroactively love a song that I had hated with enough passion to bitch about it to Landon, and that created a sense of nostalgia for that song. It was unrealistic and a complete lie, but I remembered it fondly. And that’s the positive power of nostalgia. Unfortunately, there is also a realistic side to nostalgia when going back and watching movies or playing games or reading books you remember fondly only to discover they were far different because you have grown into a different person than you were when you experienced them for the first time. It doesn’t mean that they’re “bad” or that you were a stupid kid with stupid tastes, though I do have a lot of evidence of my stupidity as a child. It just means that your interaction with the work has shifted, and that is often what people fail to understand when they are disappointed by revisiting something or are unhappy when others crap on their favorite nostalgic relic.
My nostalgia for Nine Inch Nails came after about a year of being removed from “Down In It.” But now, when I think about the year I graduated from high school, 1992, I am 33 years removed. And memory, being an imperfect device, throws me for a constant loop as I revisit things I’m nostalgic about.