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Title

This machine is obsolete: a listeners’ guide to Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile

Author(s)

Burns, Alex

Abstract

The industrial music group Nine Inch Nails’ album The Fragile (1999) is a gritty meditation on The End. Dominant approaches in late 1990s cyberculture criticism are critiqued, drawing on millennialist subcultures as dynamically emergent from ideas, social change and religious traditions. NIN’s Trent Reznor is posited as an industrial music practitioner comparable to David Cronenberg, Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun or Greil Marcus. The paper then provides a hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis of The Fragile as an ur-text of Reznor’s (attempted) cultural adaptation and psychological survival in a fragmented world, where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. At millennium’s end, industrial and electronica music like The Fragile capture the ‘assimilation gap’ between 19th century ‘war on self’ worldviews, the Sadeian aesthetics of Dark Eros, and the dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge.

Publication type

Journal article

Source

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 2, no. 8 (Dec 1999)

Publication year

1999

FOR Code(s)

160104 Social and Cultural Anthropology;  160805 Social Change;  220209 History of Ideas;  220307 Hermeneutic and Cultural Theory;  220310 Phenomenology;  220407 Studies in Religious Traditions

Keyword(s)

Aesthetics;  Bloom, Howard (1943-);  Cohn, Norman (1946-);  Cronenberg, David (1943-);  Cultural adaptation;  Dark Eros;  de Sade, Marquis (1740-1814);  Dery, Mark (1959-);  Eshun, Kodwo (1967-);  Electronica;  Industrial music;  Marcus, Greil (1945-);  Manson, Marilyn (1969-);  Reznor, Trent (1965-);  Nine Inch Nails;  The Fragile;  Webb, Don;  Wilson, Edward O. (1929-)

Publisher

Queensland University of Technology

ISSN

1441-2616

Publisher URL

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/9912/nine.php

Copyright

Copyright © 1999 M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivatives 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ .

Full text

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