10 Songs That Saved Rock And Roll
6. Closer - Nine Inch Nails
It seemed like everybody tried to put some sort of rose colored glasses on after the grunge scene imploded. With nothing much else to take Kurt Cobain's place in the cultural pantheon, most people either moved on to slower adult alternative music or dove head first into the Britpop and pop punk bandwagons happening around the same time. If you looked closely though, something much more sinister was coming from one goth kid and a whole bunch of MIDI effects.
On the surface, something like Closer shouldn't really work. From the glitchy beat to the vulgar lyrics, there was no way that something like this would be on the radio these days. When you work with what Trent Reznor had though, it almost becomes impossible to resist, taking an Iggy Pop sample and blowing it up to sound dangerous, disturbed, and oddly arousing all at the same time.
As far as the rest of the metal world was concerned, this was when the industrial boom started to go mainstream, with people like White Zombie getting picked up around the same time. This kind of music would never really trouble the charts all that often, but it sure as hell broadened the playing field as to what you could get away with to get a hit.