Music Mondays: Nine Inch Nails

Industrial Identities and Resisting the Herd Mentality

Today’s musical focus is a response to a reader request.

I admit that I have never been a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails. This has nothing specifically to do with the band, or even particular feelings about Trent Reznor, their lead singer and songwriter. Instead, it is more a matter of not really liking industrial music.

Nine Inch Nails

As a drummer who was trained playing jazz fusion, gospel, and funk, industrial music just always seemed a bit uninspiring. Admittedly, when the Nine Inch Nails were rocking in the early 1990s, the idea of Generative AI was not something even in the popular imagination. However, I have always found industrial music to be a kind of cyborg phenomenon. It’s almost like the musicians were trying to figure out how close they could come to sounding like computer generated noise without falling off the precipice by which they could find their way back to humanity.