(no subject)
I saw the Nine Inch Nails show at Joe Louis Arena on Saturday night, and lemme tell you, even though he's forty years old, Trent Reznor still rocks. Hard. There's a perception that Nine Inch Nails has lost it's cultural relevance, that once angst and nihilism went out of style with the passing of grunge, Nine Inch Nails faded from our cultural consciousness because it no longer mattered.
That's a load of shit.
Nine Inch Nails never culturally 'mattered,' because while Trent Reznor may be a well educated and opinionated guy, his lyrics never amounted to anything more than 'Things fucking suck, there is no God, so lets just take drugs and fuck until we explode.' And that's fine. Because it rocked. You can't point towards a single cultural achievement spawned from his 'message,' other than maybe the 'conformity is cool' backlash against stuff like NIN that we seem to have been stuck in since that 'I like girls who wear abercombie and fitch' song came out in 1997.
If anything, Nine Inch Nails musical relevance has done nothing but increase since the coming of hip-pop and sad white boy rock, because the music is really, really good and very complicated. I don't know very much about the science behind the tunes we hear, but I know for sure that there's more going on in, say, Hurt, than there is in all the Hollaback Girl's that have or ever will be produced.
There isn't a better live band that I can think of, and it doesn't seem to matter which iteration of 'Trent Reznor plus goofy looking guys playing Trent Reznor's music' you see. NIN is better live than even -gasp!- Radiohead. And that's the truth.
So, for anybody in the know, the setlist was really great. Particularly exciting was the inclusion of Burn from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. I also liked the performance of Suck, and the version of Hurt we got was absolutely amazing. TR delt with Closer in the best way possibe: It was maybe the fourth or fifth song in the set, there was no intro, they played it and moved on. That's how you deal with your uber-mega-hit that everyone knows.
It's funny, though, because there was this group of highschool kids who, aparently, are only familiar with 'With Teeth,' because Sarah heard one of them remark 'I don't know this one...' when Closer played. You don't... know... Closer? What the fuck are you doing at a Nine Inch Nails concert?
Overall, I thought it was a better show than the 2000 Fragility2.0 tourdate I caught at The Palace.
Also, the best looking Goth Kids I've ever seen showed up. I'm talking bajillion dollar goth outfits. They looked like aliens, like they could have been backing Marilyn Manson in 1997. They have a band called 'Columbine' (Yeah, really cool guys) that you should check out on Myspace. Just to see their Space-Goth-Head explosion.