Other than the fact that the FBI, the Michigan State Police and Chicago’s finest all believed that Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor was dead, 1989 was a pretty good year for NIN. The band released their first album, Pretty Hate Machine which contained the soon-to-be smash single “Down In It” that would help propel NIN to early stardom. Prior to the release of the first song ever written by Reznor, NIN headed to Chicago to shoot a video for the single. And that’s when this story starts to get very, very weird.

In order to achieve the aerial shots for the video, the crew attached balloons to a few cameras. One of the cameras decided to go rogue and floated over 300 miles to Michigan before landing in the middle of a cornfield (I told you things were going to get weird). The camera was then found by a farmer who, after looking at the footage of Reznor covered in cornstarch (in order to enhance his dead-guy look), surrounded by guitarist Richard Patrick and drummer Chris Vrenna, turned it into the police. The footage appeared to be authentically nefarious in nature to the cops who were convinced that the footage in the camera was either the product of some sort of satanic ritual, gang-related slaying or even a suicide.

If you’re a fan of NIN you may already be acquainted with this bizarre bit of history, especially if you also watched the television tabloid show Hard Copy back in the early 1990s. Hard Copy took NIN and Reznor to task then when they ran an exposé on the faux-murder and its lengthy criminal investigation. During the broadcast which originally aired on March 5th, 1991, the show used cheesy “re-enactments” of the “crime” as well as providing equally cheesy and condescending commentary by way of host Alan Frio and the glib curator of the segment, actor Rafael Abramovitz. They even included an interview segment with Reznor himself during which he shared his thoughts about the bizarre debacle:

“When the news came through that this was some sort of a cult killing, and that I had been killed, this great story, my initial reaction was that it was really funny, that something could be that blown out of proportion, and so many people were working on it. And I felt kinda good that the police had made idiots of themselves.”

More after the jump…

 
There was, perhaps, not much to love about the 1996 soundtrack to the Jackie Chan vehicle Supercop, but—as you could also have said, justly, in defense of the 1983 soundtrack to the Dan Aykroyd vehicle Doctor Detroit—there was at least this: two brand-new tracks from DEVO were etched in its grooves. The pride of Akron contributed the theme song, “Supercop,” and an interpretation of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole.” These were, I believe, the first new recordings they released in the nineties.

The Clinton years were not a total famine for the dutiful spudboy; there were opportunities to see DEVO play, and there was even the DEVO CD-ROM game that sucked away months of my life I probably should have spent learning to write code, speak Italian, or build pipe bombs. But no matter how rosy those days look from our current perspective, that period was not so great for the DEVO fan, either. Jerry Casale put his finger on it at a 1999 show in Universal City, observing from the stage that, pace Prince, it would actually have been more fun to party like it was 1981, because back then there had been plenty of good cocaine, and you could still get a blowjob without going to jail (a reference to l’affaire Lewinsky).
 

 
As much as I like NIN records, Trent Reznor’s persona and lyrical concerns have presented obstacles to my entertainment now and again, over the years. I have a lot of thoughts about why this is, and I will expound upon them at length if you buy me a beer, but it probably comes down to a preference for the satirical over the confessional mode. In other words, because DEVO tends to place the emphasis on others’ stupidity rather than their own hurt feelings, they can sing “Head Like A Hole” without sounding merely aggrieved.

More after the jump…

 
Nine Inch Nails’ Broken (also known as The Broken Movie) is a 1993 short film featuring four music videos from the Broken EP with wrap-around segments shot in the style of an amateur snuff film. The extremely graphic film was directed by Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and Hipgnosis design group fame.

The NSFW video has never seen an official release (perhaps because no label would want to put their name on it?) and has to this day been a difficult piece to track down.
 

 
The terrifying, violent,  and unforgettable film was originally “leaked” by Trent Reznor himself via hand-dubbed VHS tapes in the ‘90s. The original tapes were given by Reznor to various friends with video dropouts at certain points so he could know who redistributed any copies that might surface. Reznor, later implied in a comment on the Nine Inch Nails website that Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was responsible for the most prominent leak of the original tape.

In 2006 and 2013 the film was briefly “leaked” to the Internet, many believe by Reznor himself. In both cases, the film disappeared quickly. In the case of the 2013 “leak,” the entire video was made available for streaming on Vimeo via the Nine Inch Nails Tumblr account, but was removed by Vimeo almost immediately.

For the time being (in other words, WATCH IT WHILE YOU CAN), Broken has been uploaded to Archive.org under fair use laws.

It’s not for the squeamish, so we’re tucking of after the jump…

 
Since the holidays are coming up, I’d thought I share with these limited edition Trent Reznor boots by N.I.C.E. Collective. The Reznor Combat Boots sell for $1,100 (which isn’t so nice).

The Reznor Combat Boot is a limited edition black ink & wax finish that we recently created for our friend Trent Reznor of NIN. The vibram lug sole is the perfect all-terrain tread for the modern explorer.  Built locally in San Francisco, this unique adaptation of the N.I.C.E. Collective Combat boot will only be sold through our online shop for a limited time.  Starting today.

So if you have money to burn, or you’re a trust fund kid industrial music lover who needs to prove what a deeply hardcore NIN fan you are, these shit-kicking “Reznor boots” are for you! It’s not as if you couldn’t find something similar enough for ten bucks somewhere, but here ya go…

 

 

 
Via Coilhouse on Facebook

 
By about a thousand lengths, Black Sabbath’s best song is “Supernaut” from Black Sabbath Vol.4. You’re free to argue the point, but you won’t change my mind. Yeah, “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” are obviously among metal’s greatest works, and the MONSTER riffs from “N.I.B.” and “Into the Void”  are indelible. But “Supernaut?” BEST. PERIOD. The hefty physicality of Tony Iommi’s performance of the main guitar riff melts me down into a puddle every time I hear it, and when Ozzy wails “I wanna reach out and touch the sky / I wanna touch the sun but I don’t need to fly”  I goddamn believe HE CAN, with or without mountains of drugs. It’s absolutely perfect.
 
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A lot of now-classic albums have grown into their reputations over the course of years or decades, but the Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut Psychocandy was one of those whose epochal nature was screamingly obvious right out of the starting gate. Because so many bands in the last 30 years have copped JaMC’s move of burying SoCal pop and surf tropes under layers of reverb, noise, and darkness, it might be hard to convey just how INSANE they sounded when they were upstarts. I’m going to date myself pretty seriously here, but the first time I heard them, I was 15, delivering my paper route (laugh all you want, it was money for records), and listening to college radio on my Walkman. The song “Never Understand” came on, and I don’t know how the hell I didn’t fall off my bike. It seemed amazingly assaultive—full of ugly squealing feedback and guitars that could just as well have been broken vacuum cleaners, propelled at a nervous clip by caveman drumming that somehow sounded like it was stalking you, and yet it was catchy as hell, sporting laid-back, almost drowsy vocals that didn’t belong anywhere near that out-of-control musical mess, but it all clicked perfectly, like there was nothing weird about it at all. These young noise-abusers from Scotland had managed the feat of making themselves the Velvet Underground’s second coming. Even if they’d done nothing else worth hearing (and that’s decidedly not the case, of course, they churned out a lot of very cool stuff), Psychocandy would have cemented their legend.
 
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YITT stands for “Yep, I’m the Toaster” (shades of James Hetfield’s vigorous declaration of his status as a table?), and it’s the nom de mash of a self-proclaimed “Amateur mashup artist/producer/drummer, photographer/mashup video editor” from the Bay Area. His Soundcloud page is full of goodies, but he’s lately posted a little piece of genius. In answer to pomDeter’s highly amusing “Call Me a Hole” from a couple of years back, YITT has made an unholy chimera of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “I Really Like You” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole.” The recontextualization makes Trent Reznor’s angst sound… so… HAPPY! I do so wish Trent could be happy all the time. And the video mixing is every bit as skillful as the sound.

And here, I didn’t think the Internet was going to cough up anything funnier today than the Hard Times’ torpedoing of One Life Crew.
 

 
Via the AV Club