Re-discovering that "Hesitation Marks" is the one and only Nine Inch Nails album that Tidal doesn't have¹ and cracking up all over over again
"Oh, you didn't want *that* one"
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¹ I think the last time I looked into this it turned out to be a Canada geoIP thing.
@mcc
Oooh, thanks for the tip.. haven't listened to that one in quite a while, I actually have that one here! (Also thanks for the other tips further down-thread, I actually don't have those. Will have to investigate)
@mcc I think any of us who were "young" in the 90s/2000s and who are "fans of NIN" have a complex relation with Trent's music. It's difficult to casually listen to Trent's older work because of the content and the themes. How can anyone be a "fan" of music like that?
"Hesitation Marks" is probably my favorite NIN album and has been since it came out. It still has interesting things to say, is great music, and isn't as inherently upsetting to listen to.
@DJTentMode unclear if i could enjoy music which isn't upsetting. i'm just looking for. the new upsetting
@mcc I remember someone else on some social media platform say something like, "You either die young, or live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become 'Dad Rock'." Which is really the most upsetting thing to consider in this whole scenario!
@DJTentMode imagine what it must have been like for trent reznor to become Dad
@mcc
🏴☠️
Also, locally stored collection is superior to any other alternative either way.
Anyway this is my periodic reminder to you that if you used to be into NIN but fell off after "with teeth"/"year zero":
You really, *really* want to locate the "Not the Actual Events" / "Add Violence" / "Bad Witch" 2016-2018 EP trio, and just listen to all three in one go as if it's a 3-disc album (I have them set up as one playlist called "Not Violent Witch").
This run of music was *incredible*, career high, and it's deeply haunted by Reznor's personal friendships with Davids Lynch and Bowie
@mcc would you recommend them to a fan of the Challengers (2024) soundtrack? I've honestly been meaning to branch out in that direction
@ellie in my opinion both and Year Zero and The Slip are better than With Teeth. Year Zero was a Big concept album that was almost a sci fi rock opera with a whole ARG of websites from the what-if-the-gwb-administration-went-on-20-years world of the album that's probably offline now. The Slip was a short sweet one that he gave away free on his website that's a bit insubstantial made of 6 fun dumb rock tracks and then a 4-track mostly-instrumental run that's some of his best work
@ellie but year zero/the slip kinda feel like "what if With Teeth had been good?" and the 2010s EP trilogy has a pretty distinct feel.
@mcc if you're in a Canadian geoIP region and you want to buy the FLACs of these EPs:
https://ca.7digital.com/artist/nine-inch-nails/release/add-violence-explicit-61241574
https://ca.7digital.com/artist/nine-inch-nails/release/not-the-actual-events-explicit-61241612
https://ca.7digital.com/artist/nine-inch-nails/release/bad-witch-61241509
@mcc wait, I thought Reznor started doing some CC0 thing and didn’t release any music after With Teeth/Year Zero??? I’m missing Nine Inch Nails stuff?!
@c0dec0dec0de What?
There have been exactly two "Ghosts" projects— the CC0 dump you're referring to and a later one from more recent.
If u dropped off there you're missing The Slip which is short but magnificent, Hesitation Marks which as noted above I'm not so fond of (but the remixes are good), the EP trilogy which is maybe his greatest work, several full film scores with the 12 Rounds guy (two of which won Oscars), and an enigmatic one-off Hurricane Katrina benefit https://mastodon.social/@mcc/109037958139279222
@mcc Nice use of "Davids" there.
@mcc My playlist for them is a much less inventive "NIN 3EP". I really wish he'd package them up into a single album, kinda like K.Flay did with Inside Voices / Outside Voices.
@mcc what do you mean, "fell off after year zero", I first heard them (live, their first tour ever in Slovakia and the first "big" concert I went to) on that tour! That album is as good as any!
@pkraus Year Zero is amazing and I think there is consensus it is amazing, but IMO the album before it ("With Teeth") is a bit of a down note, and the major album after it ("Hesitation Marks") is often treated as a down note, and a lot of people don't like "The Slip" but they're wrong because "The Slip" rules
@pkraus and somewhere there was a gap in there and the "How to Destroy Angels" albums, so I think some people had just stopped paying attention by 2016 which is a tragedy
@mcc I just finished listening to the “Not Violent Witch” playlist and it is so good!
Thank you!
@wtrmt note: if you literally mean you found the playlist on tidal, be advised that two of the 3 EPs are currently unavailable on tidal and so what actually happened is you just listened to the single EP "bad witch". Which honestly. Is a very good idea that I endorse doing
@mcc still listening and enjoying! Thank you so much!
@mcc I built the playlist on Apple Music, taking the liberty of naming it “Not Violent Witch”. Here it is, should anyone wants to listen to it.
https://music.apple.com/cl/playlist/not-violent-witch/pl.u-pMyl1Wbs4eeBkM?l=en
(Added hashtags for discovery)
@wtrmt This is great thank you for this public service
There's a track in the EP trio that exists solely because Reznor was trying to make a song David Lynch would like. Lynch asked if Reznor would appear in one of the musical segments in Twin Peaks The Return and Reznor was like sure how about we play this new song I'm working on? And Lynch was not ehh this isn't really the vibe… and so Reznor was like okay I have to make a song that is the vibe
"She's Gone Away" is literally designed to be a song that, if Nine Inch Nails existed in the universe of "Twin Peaks" but in the "Twin Peaks" universe Nine Inch Nails had never found mainstream popularity so in 2015 NIN was just touring with no budget playing small bars, "She's Gone Away" is the song Reznor would perform to the drinking crowd at the "Bang Bang Bar" outside the sleepy, haunted town of Twin Peaks, Washington with his wife playing the tambourine behind him. That's why it exists
Okay so it's been explained to me that actually several large chunks of the NiN library are not available digitally at all currently due to Reznor's frequent label changes and some sort of presumably temporary snafu in inter-publisher negotiations, and shamefully Tidal does not currently even have "Not the Actual Events". Copyright does not succeed at the thing our society designed copyright to do
@mcc I can’t believe I’m about to defend copyright, but copyright works fine here! Labels otoh can rot.
Non-jokingly, my advice to you: Do not become addicted to heroin and then sign contracts with a music industry label
@mcc I’m currently reading James Kaplan’s “3 Shades of Blue”, ostensibly about Davis, Coltrane, and Evans but really a fairly wide ranging picture of 50s jazz in the US.
So many musicians got seriously screwed over by heroin and music labels during that time.
@mcc «it's important to do the things in the correct order»
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116025752963855521
Listening to Nine Inch Nails is so complicated to me. I would just loop his music for weeks at a time, for years, it was like the soundtrack of my own feelings, and then
and now I can't listen to the old stuff, the post 2015-stuff feels right to me but the old stuff is like, a dissonant note, the thing that was going "yeah, that's what life feels like" is going "this doesn't feel like me anymore", the feeling doesn't make sense to me anymore, but here's the thing:
But it's tradition. 
@mcc I’m pretty sure the heroin thing is the comparatively harmless part here
@mcc I will try to avoid doing either of those things. Both at once seems... bad?
@mcc Copywrong must be abolished. All creativity should exist to enhance the public domain.
@mcc and it was more or less the tonal center and focal pivot of one of the most incredible episodes of television ever made
@jplebreton Yeah
AND THE "THE NINE INCH NAILS" THING WAS UNSCRIPTED. THE ANNOUNCER GUY JUST DID THAT
@mcc the return has some of the best "accidental but works perfectly" world building, real lessons for the wiki-brains out there
@mcc speaking of Canadian things
