A Flashback

When I hear a new song, there are few occasions on which I like the song immediately. Usually I have to hear it a few times before I decide that it is truly a good song. Maybe I'm slow to commit, or maybe it's just a selection mechanism, to weed out those catchy songs that will become tiresome after I hear them four or five times. I've found that usually the best songs, and the ones that I end up liking the longest, follow an opposite progression. When I first hear them, I don't feel strongly about them one way or the other. Then as I hear them a few more times, they start to grow on me, until I'm listening to them more and more often.

This happened to me recently with the song "Only" by Nine Inch Nails. Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, "Nine Inch Nails? Really? Isn't this the same guy who was just talking about Van Morrison and Paul Simon?" And I have to admit that I wasn't expecting any of the songs from their most recent album, With Teeth, to grow on me the way this one did. After all, the last time I listened regularly to Nine Inch Nails had to be some time in Middle School, back in the height of my Metallica phase ("phase" might be the wrong word, I mean, I still like Metallica, I'm just less obvious about it now). And sure, a large part of the reason that I started listening to them was because they were loud and counter-cultural (at least to an Irish Catholic boy living in Suburbia). But the more I listened to Nine Inch Nails, the more I got out of the music. It was complex, at times melodic, at times simple, but always powerful, and quite emotional.

However, my young ears were not yet trained enough to pick up on these subtleties, and so, in High School, I forgot about Nine Inch Nails, along with the countless other "Heavy Metal" bands found in my collection from that time (Metallica, Skid Row, Faith No More, Slayer, Megadeth, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, and Soundgarden are the ones I can remember). Which was why I was surprised when I heard "Only", and heard something quite different from the Nine Inch Nails that I remembered. I didn't hear thrashing metal guitars, I heard a catchy beat. I didn't hear screaming vocals, I heard a melodic line. I expected the music to remind me of those metal bands I had abandoned, but the bands it reminded me of surprised me greatly. The self-conscious lyrics made it sound like it could have been a Bright Eyes song, while Reznor's half-singing, half-talking vocals brought to mind David Byrne and the Talking Heads. Needless to say, neither is exactly of the same genre as Nine Inch Nails.

Of course, the music itself is decidedly Nine Inch Nails, and couldn't be mistaken for anything else. And this is saying quite a bit, that I could stop listening to a band for, say, 10 years, then come back and recognize their new material immediately as being theirs. But if you listen to "Only", you'll quickly notice that it doesn't sound like what you would expect from a band with a reputation for being loud and industrial. It's fairly tame, actually. And that reflects the passage of time. Since Nine Inch Nails debuted, metal went from new and fringe to much more mainstream and accepted, and then disappeared almost entirely. But the things that Reznor was doing in the music withstood the test of time, which is why a new album so many years later can still be effective. Back then, I listened to it because it was new and different. Now, I listen to it because I like it.

And so I find that, when I pick up my old albums by bands like Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, or Faith No More, the music still holds up. It's no longer edgy, and has lost its ability to anger the older generations, but at least when it lost that, it didn't lose its listenability entirely. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Skid Row or Slayer.

Hey, isn't the guy from Skid Row on Gilmore Girls now? Is that show still on?