12 Things Only Nine Inch Nails Fans Would Understand

12. The More You Listen, The More You Hear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5lQwJqrjkM Industrial music enthusiasts tend to throw a violent tantrum when Nine Inch Nails is thrown into their precious, dirty pigeonhole - "It's too clean, it's too bouncy", they claim. Apparently if the beats aren't recorded in someone's workshop by sweaty men in gimp suits, it's too commercial; too MTV. So let's forget genre classifications for a moment. Instead, we look at Trent Reznor's core product as something that exists on its own plane - few have so successfully welded as many styles into one, and created music which is infinitely listenable, diverse, and incredibly meaningful to millions of people. One of the things that longtime fans tend to go on about - when they're not whining about the missing Tapeworm files or trying to find shards of broken keyboard keys on eBay - is the layered musical approach that Reznor takes with NIN. It sounds trite, but years of fandom will point out that Nine Inch Nails gets better the more you listen to it. Years after release there will still be new sounds, new underlying scratches and shades of hidden rhythms, even new whispered phrases or muted screams that emerge like a decayed body from a lake. This is something that will be lost on the proletariat, but for those who've taken the time to devour each track over and over, each new revelation is like hearing the song again for the first time. Obviously not every track is smouldering with subconscious mystery - they can't all be eternal treasure chests - but there is usually surprising depth lurking in even the most basic of Reznor's creations.