Music Box | Nine Inch Nails

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

Nine Inch Nails
Year Zero
[Nothing]

Zero is a non-entity, a symbol of nothingness. It’s the absence of something once there and the idea of what never was. It carries obvious apocalyptic connotations that speak to all things—time, the world, us—ending as they began: at zero. Among the alternative rock superstars of the 1990s who wallowed in a saline bath of negativity, the zero was sexiest to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who named his record label “Nothing” and whose songs were slathered with images of death, decay, and an overwhelming hopelessness that dared to reach further than grunge. His fascination with the zero point was surpassed only by his anger at the depraved society that brought us there.

It’s pretty safe to say that Nine Inch Nails’ philosophy was what mattered most to Reznor, but it was the kinky, sensual production that roped in new listeners and made them stick around—at least until 1999, when the long and boring The Fragile left Nine Inch Nails with only a few diehards. Since then, the band has struggled not only to keep pace with changing times but also to maintain the studio smarts that rightfully placed them at the top of the industrial music canon. 2005’s almost-good With Teeth gave some indication that Nine Inch Nails had another monster in them, and when I heard that the next offering would be Reznor’s most explicitly apocalyptic album, my hopes rose to historic highs.

I should have known better. Jumped up on With Teeth’s moderate success, Reznor recorded another bloated exercise in tunelessness and drab grayscale, a 16-song slab of stark, stale industrial with fewer redeeming qualities than anyone could have expected. For what it’s worth, Reznor is acutely aware of how his various records fit into the Nine Inch Nails story; he knows, for example, that Year Zero is a complete departure from With Teeth, using early Public Enemy records (you know, just the insurmountable It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet) as springboards, both in their simple “beats-and-rhymes” aesthetic and their bald-faced politicizing. What Reznor doesn’t realize is that hip-hop and industrial go together like potato chips and mayonnaise (i.e. they don’t), and that, to read the writing on the wall, all anyone wants is a Downward Spiral II that he keeps failing to deliver.

Even with the potential for an interesting hybrid—in the right hands, anything can succeed—Reznor wears Year Zero’s empty minimalism like a bad suit of armor. For a man who used to stuff his productions with some of the scariest noises a computer could cough up, he seems to have forgotten that it takes more than a beat, a few honking noises and some moaned lyrics to make a rock song. I give him a little credit for trying new things, but nothing works: not the soapbox shouting on “The Beginning of the End,” not the circa-1987 beat on “My Violent Heart,” not the ridiculous calls-and-responses on “God Given.” The band couldn’t even get the singles right: “Survivalism” is a flabby anti-song that mistakes speed and loudness for catchiness, while “Capital G” is even worse, with Reznor performing an unspeakably embarrassing Gwen Stefani impression atop D.O.A. drum machines and flatulent, atonal synthesizers. Gross.

The overtly political lyrics are well-intentioned, I guess, but they’re a prime example of how Year Zero suffers when Reznor doesn’t play to his strengths. There’s no subtlety in a phrase like “I pushed a button and elected him to office / he pushed a button and dropped a bomb,” and it’s about 100 times less interesting than “I want to fuck you like an animal / my whole existence is flawed / you get me closer to God.” Year Zero’s aggression is aimed almost exclusively at outside forces, which is a problem only in that Reznor has always been most fascinating at his most conflicted, pointing out society’s gravest flaws while taking a kind of sick pleasure in surrounding himself with them and noting his own resultant contamination. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has been the subject of so many recent albums, most of them bad (…Trail of Dead’s Worlds Apart, Trans Am’s Liberation, Radio 4’s The Stealing of a Nation), and so much of it reads the same. And since Reznor has spent years painstakingly sculpting his persona as a brilliant outsider, consensus doesn’t look good on him.

Add all this up, and Year Zero begins to appear not like the end of the world, but the end of Nine Inch Nails’ career. Unintentional zeroes pop up like weeds: zero tunes, zero worthwhile lyrics, zero concessions to his core audience and zero attempts to elevate this dreck above an ugly, impotent rant. Only a couple decent tracks (“The Good Soldier,” “In This Twilight”) rescue the album from zero stars. Like all other life on Earth, famous musicians’ careers follow a trajectory that includes a birth, a peak, and a death, and all good things must eventually die. Only after hearing Year Zero do I see Nine Inch Nails’ life from 2000 to 2007 for what it really was: a slow, stubborn downward spiral to zero, and it’s difficult not to interpret every thudding beat as Trent Reznor finally hitting rock bottom.