10 Artists Who Slated The Beatles
8. Trent Reznor
You have to feel for rock stars trying to mark their mark and secure their legacy, only to constantly have the legends of the past thrown in their faces. How do you secure a spot at rock’s top table when critical consensus has already conferred insurmountable godlike status onto The Stones, Led Zeppelin and, yes, The Beatles?
Perhaps it was this constant deification of Sixties and Seventies rock gods that made Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor vent his spleen about John, Paul, George and Ringo in a 1994 interview with Plazm magazine.
“I hate to think in a retro mindset. You know, 'The Beatles were the best thing...'. F**k The Beatles, I hated people who were always going on about the fuckin' Beatles. They're dead. They're ugly now. Get them out of my sight.”
It seems however, that Reznor later changed his tune, the Fab Four’s sprawling, self-titled double album offering the Oscar winning musician a gateway into the band’s back catalogue. Asked by Rolling Stone who he considers to be a genius, Trent replied,
“It’s so obvious, but The Beatles. When I was growing up, the people who liked The Beatles, I didn’t like, so I didn’t pay attention to them. Around The Downward Spiral, I really started digging White Album-era Beatles, and it expanded outward from there. They were so far ahead of the game, it’s just not fair.”