08.14.2009
BACK TO YEAR ZERO: NINE INCH NAILS IN MANILA
My first question is this: Where have all these people been all these years? I saw them that night in expectant rain-soaked droves. And they weren’t queuing up for Buy 1, Take 1 brand-name overruns. It wasn’t a mad rush to get to the newly-refurbished Michael Jackson record-store racks either. It was the Araneta, yes, but there was no scheduled Wednesday-night Ginebra game. These people really came to see Nine Inch Nails, whose aptly dubbed Wave Goodbye tour made its Manila stop on August 5. This should not come as a surprise, I told myself. Trent Reznor is a man once named by Time as a “most influential” figure in 1997, after all. We shouldn’t even start talking sales—in the neighborhood of tens of millions, sparked by the crossover success that was The Downward Spiral in 1994—because NIN is hardly about selling, although they have sold very well. That night was a testament to anger, but it was also a (coincidental) celebration. Rain goes two ways at least anyway.
We had just buried a beloved former president a few hours ago. And her loss underscored what-we-have-now, just as Trent and company’s arrival is (coincidentally) underscoring what-happened-to-music. Maybe Kierkegaard was right: there is no happy now, just an ecstatic recollection of yesterday and a cheerful hope for tomorrow.
I skipped my high school batch’s reunion a week ago. I didn’t see any practical use for making such a trip, although these guys are ace (don’t get me wrong). Maybe I was avoiding it because the prospect of seeing thirty-or-so people who are vague reminders of what-I-used-to-be didn’t charm me; it terrified me. I don’t know if I’m a much better person (define “better”) now, but maybe my blissful yesterday will put my worry-riddled present to shame (define “shame”). Did seeing Nine Inch Nails stress how awful some of today’s music has become? Or did it give me hope? Besides, when Reznor cut his initial demo in the late ‘80s (pre-Pretty Hate Machine), it wasn’t like musical geniuses roamed every square-inch of the earth.
“What do you wanna hear tonight?” I asked a girl friend when I bump into her on my way to the gate. “I wanna hear stuff from With Teeth!” she said excitedly. “I’m not ashamed to say I’m here for The Downward Spiral and ‘The Perfect Drug,’” I said in response. “And I wanna hear ‘The Fragile’ from The Fragile,” I added. There was a sense, however, that all our listening prepwork before the show would virtually go to waste, as Nine Inch Nails is one of those bands that makes their fans second-guess like hell. They’re like The Grateful Dead that way (though thank God Mr. Reznor doesn’t feel that hour-long guitar jams are necessary): you need to cap your fandom with a live show. And you need to hunt for the smattering of B-sides and singles to and fro.
NIN fandom is like a high-commitment RPG: no short breaks to go to the loo.
Pupil, NIN’s support act, didn’t disappoint. Augmented by Electrico’s Amanda Ling on synths, the band performed an all-English set that opened with “Different Worlds” and closed with “Matador” (from Beautiful Machines and Wildlife, respectively). They wore yellow arm-bands and dedicated their set to the memory of the late President Cory Aquino. As always, the band swayed from calm-and-melodic to riotous-and-syncopated with ease, peaking during their signature number “Disconnection Notice,” which, some sources say, was the deciding song in their selection as NIN support act. Ling’s inclusion, moreover, gave the band the sonic ballast it perhaps needed. For a brief moment, with my eyes closed, I imagined that Pupil was Mercury Rev, but fronted by the former singer of the Eraserheads. It worked. In any case, Pupil was Pupil: without a doubt one of the top live acts in local music.
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After almost an hour of lull, Nine Inch Nails finally took the stage, bathing in their blinding strobe lights. “We finally made it to Manila,” Trent greeted his legions, who hooted and applauded accordingly. It was hard to guess what they’d open with, since NIN songs all have that requisite crescendo that works for arena stages. “Somewhat Damaged,” from The Fragile, was it for that night though. I thought of how cocky it was to open a major show with an odd-time number (you see heads banging in false time, unable to catch up), but, also, of how much it worked and kicked major ass. What was rekindled in me was the “proper anger” loosely associated with Kurt Cobain’s ‘90s, not the “whiny teenager anger” of now. And, although Reznor sang that he was “too fucked up to carry on,” well, they did carry on…with Pretty Hate Machine’s “Terrible Lie” up next.
What followed was a slew of songs that sent orgasms of every sort (I don’t know this for sure, okay?): songs from The Downward Spiral, the record that catapulted Reznor’s act to superstardom. I don’t know if anybody else thought this, but if there had been a local censors board for gigs—like a rock equivalent of MTRCB—shows such as NIN’s would clearly be code red. Why? Because “God” is a constant persona in these foul-mouthed four-minute barrages, as with the tell-it-as-it-is “Heresy,” which goes all-out Nietzschean (“God is dead, and no one cares/If there is a Hell, I’ll see you there,” and all that business), as well as the admonitions to be (metaphorically) bestial in “Closer” (“I wanna fuck you like an animal/My whole existence is flawed/You get me closer to God”). Some accounts on the NIN message boards suggested that Manila was the first stop in the Wave Goodbye tour where the band played “Closer,” and I don’t know why this was noteworthy, except that I kept wanting to believe it’s a gift of sorts to Trent’s Filipina fiancee’s kababayans. Which of course it wasn’t.
My euphoria peaked precisely during the opening salvo of “March of the Pigs,” also from TDS. “Piggy,” “Reptile,” and “The Becoming”—also from the same record—were no walks in the park either.
Then came the mild-mannered “Johnny” and his xenophobia in “I’m Afraid of Americans,” the original version of which appears in David Bowie’s Earthling. The fan-boys went nuts (okay, we went nuts). Throwing an eager crowd a B-side or a rare cover is like throwing a dog a wishbone. More wishbones were thrown the audience’s way with songs from over a decade ago, namely “Burn” (a promo-only single that appeared in the Natural Born Killers OST in 1994) and “Gave Up” (from Broken in 1992). In all of this, guitarist Robin Finck—whose involvement in the Guns N’ Roses unicorn-of-a-record Chinese Democracy (unfairly) gets more press than his live NIN work—was a particular joy to watch (and listen to), especially when it gets to Phase Two.
Which was essentially the artier material.
You have got to admire the two-sided blade that is Reznor. On the one hand, he is the perennially blasphemous Twitter basher (he deleted his account; don’t bother looking up his apparently-resentful tweets); but, on the other hand, he is also like a muscular Brian Eno-on-speed in his display of producerly instincts. It’s hard to establish an audio-visual lock when you look at the guy; put quite simply, he doesn’t look the way he sounds, from whichever period. Things got especially curious as his band marched on with “The Fragile” (from The Fragile in 1999), and the wordless mood pieces “Gone, Still” (from Still, 2002), “Nonentity” (a B-side for With Teeth from 2007) and the poignant “La Mer” (once again from The Fragile). Well, okay, they didn’t “march on”; they bowed their heads and tinkered with laptops and sequencers and things. Eat Trent Reznor’s shorts, Jonny Greenwood.
In the soundscape-rich Throbbing Gristle-Radiohead-Mew-Sigur Ros continuum, Nine Inch Nails is the one for “proper” rock fans. Yet they are the farthest thing from garage, and maybe the closest thing to cyborgs—which is to say that NIN has that sense of rapt (and trapped) humanity, with their music purposefully sounding like transmissions from a far-away planet, rather than audiographs of the here-and-now, as with the spokenword screamfest that was “The Downward Spiral” (from The Downward Spiral), which capped the trilogy of “instrumentals” in their set. In a parallel universe, Reznor would be like Thurston Moore’s geekier (and more buff) younger cousin.
Then they momentarily came back to Planet Earth with the (relatively) straight rockers “Wish” (from Broken, 1992), “Survivalism” (from Year Zero, 2007), the happy-ishly melodic “Echoplex” (from the free downloadable album The Slip, 2008), and the epic “The Day the World Went Away” (from The Fragile yet again; 1999). The coup de grace for most people came next, when the band proceeded to do their version of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” (NIN’s version appears in the soundtrack for The Crow from 1994). Then they ended with career-spanning bookends: the monstrous “The Hand That Feeds” (from 2007’s With Teeth) and “Head Like a Hole” (from 1990’s Head Like a Hole, back when Appetite For Destruction was the order of the day). People were screaming for “The Perfect Drug,” but the band reportedly “doesn’t do that live ever,” as NIN’s shirtless guy-at-the-board—who’s either manning their mix or their lights or both—confessed to one of my musician friends; it’s apparently a pain to set up. But we really can’t complain.
Reznor, Finck, along with drummer Ian Rubin (also the former drummer for Lostprophets) and bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen (also Beck’s bassist) walked off the stage, out of the light, and (I’m just guessing) into our dreams.
They smashed things. They jumped around. They traded instruments all night long. They murdered. And that was it.
But then Reznor and Finck came back onstage to do “Hurt,” which, if you’re human, should make you bawl over instantly (and I guess some of us did).
Everyone I know goes away in the end, goddammit.
Photography by Lhen Santiago.
TAGS: Nine Inch Nails NIN
