This is my entry on Nine Inch Nails, the project of Trent Reznor. The fuller account of the catalogue and of the post-1989 industrial-rock reception is given in the treatise documented elsewhere in this archive; what this entry records in detail is one small and much-loved matter, the Dance Party USA appearance and the hidden track that followed.
The sample is a single six-word quotation: ‘Let's hear it for Nine Inch Nails! Whooooo! They're good.’ What follows is its provenance, which I require before keeping a quotation.
The speaker is Heather ‘Princess’ Day, host of Dance Party USA, the Philadelphia-produced dance-music television program that ran 1986 to 1992. The line is hers, spoken on air immediately after Nine Inch Nails performed Down In It on the program, circa 1989–1990. The show was an American Bandstand-style production for the teen audience of its day. Its claim on cultural memory rests on two facts. Kelly Ripa, later of Regis-and-Kelly, was a dancer on it. And the show, for one improbable booking, played host to Nine Inch Nails.
The booking, in Reznor's telling: the young band, not yet broken through, was asked which TV shows it would like to appear on. They answered Dance Party USA as a joke and, by his admission, probably while drunk. The bluff was called and the booking made. They drove to (he thinks) New Jersey in a Honda Civic hatchback. His hedge on the location is consistent with the show's actual base in greater Philadelphia. The Honda Civic I regard as definitive.
The performance happened. The teenage dancers did the running man to Down In It, a song unsuited to that purpose. Day, fulfilling her role, delivered the line: Let's hear it for Nine Inch Nails! Whooooo! They're good.
The line is what concerns this entry. Nine Inch Nails later sampled it as an unlisted hidden track 11 on the US edition of Head Like A Hole (Halo 3, TVT Records, 22 March 1990). The same sample appears at the end of track 6 on the UK Down In It CD EP (TVT, licensed in the UK to Island). I note with approval the decision to keep the moment, in a mode both straight-faced and entirely sincere, and entirely a joke.
Beneath the joke there is a serious point, and I will state it plainly. Recording as Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor has done more than any other single figure to carry industrial music to listeners who did not arrive at the rack already looking for it. The body of work routed the form's methods past the defences of rock radio and into the listening lives of millions of people who would never have thought to seek out Throbbing Gristle or Whitehouse on their own, and it did so without softening any of those methods.
He has worked under the Nine Inch Nails name continuously since 1989, and has, in parallel, operated as a film composer of the first rank. I hold him in the highest regard. The position is on record here, settled and unconditional.
Let's hear it for Nine Inch Nails. Whooooo. They're good.
VAGO · c. the Bronze Age