Word: reznor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...impact still reverberates through the rock world. Its raging guitars and walloping percussion are more aggressive than anything that came before. The record was a Kafkaesque critique of an industrial world filled with poison-spewing factories and desolate, ruined people. Its harrowing music, for better or worse, established Reznor and his band, Nine Inch Nails, as one of the few fresh voices rock has produced since Kurt Cobain. But in the view of some social critics, its X-rated imagery made Reznor the spiritual sire of school violence and corrupted youth...
Success brought Reznor, now 34, his own label, Nothing Records, and his own studio, built in an old funeral home near his mansion in New Orleans. Music writers called him rock's savior, while awestruck fans--Goths, punks, heavy-metal heads and hard-core rockers alike--showered him with handwritten poems and paintings inspired by his music...
Then, with a Kubrick-like air of mystery, Reznor withdrew into the cocoon of his velvet-walled home, and for the next five years was scarcely heard from. Emerging from his gloomy exile, he has a changed perspective and quite a story to tell about his years cloistered away. And he is packing a few surprises, for The Fragile is not just more of the same old musical Sturm und Drang. "The Fragile is a journey out from a place of desperation," says Reznor. "There are threads of optimism...
...journey the album depicts parallels Reznor's own rocky one. The mind-whammy of sudden celebrity, the devastating 1997 death of the grandmother who raised him in his hometown of Mercer, Pa., and the overwhelming pressure to come up with another hit all converged to push Reznor into a quicksand of depression. "I was in a bad place," he recalls. "I couldn't work. I couldn't look in the mirror." Seldom listening to radio, tuning in to MTV "only to remind myself not what to do," he shut himself off from the world. For weeks he avoided the studio...
...Reznor finally clambered out with the aid of a therapist. "[Therapy] helped me in the sense that it provided an explanation. They said, 'You're not up and down, you're just a quart low.' Not bad." The awareness of his mild depression left him, he says, "not repaired but enlightened. I'm aware of my fragility now, which is a better thing. I'm not afraid to admit...