10 Terrible Rock Songs That Killed Classic Albums
5. Big Man With a Gun - Nine Inch Nails
The entire mission behind the Downward Spiral was to put you into the mind of a man in the midst of an existential breakdown. Throughout every single song, you get to know more about what makes Mr. Self Destruct tick, until he finally meets his end by trying to strip himself away of any human dignity he has left. That doesn’t make for the most pleasant songs to listen to, but Big Man With a Gun is where Trent Reznor really started to lose the plot.
Set right in the middle of the album when the narrator is giving into his more animalistic tendencies, this song was meant to just be a short joke song about sex, with Trent not exactly hiding the more horrid sexual assaults that this man is going to get into. In the era when shock rock was reigning though, this just created more controversy for the album than what Reznor had hoped, with people just citing this as an anthem for people who actually want to commit acts of sexual violence.
In all fairness, Reznor seemed to agree on some of the stuff looking back on it, thinking that the song was just an innocent parody of how misogynistic gangsta rap had become but taking it one notch too far. We already have a song like Closer for the most unsexy song about sex ever created…we didn’t really need a sequel further on down the album.