Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP turns 25 today, and if you're bad at math, that means it came out in 1992. The Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato tells Revolver he was in eighth grade at the time it came out, and the EP opened up a whole world for him that he had never really considered before.
Broken was released three years after Pretty Hate Machine, and two years before the world exploded via The Downward Spiral in 1994.
When I consider what Nine Inch Nails‘ Broken means to me, I think, as I normally do, about attitude, and about feel, and about overall meaning and inspiration. What place it has or had in my life, in my trajectory or growth, if there’s meaning there at all, and then why. I don’t think about songs.
Very rarely do I care too much about an album simply because of the songs, at least not in the “oh, this is a favorite song of mine,” or an “oh, this is pleasant to listen to” type of way. When works of any kind of genre or medium really resonate with me, it’s because they embody a feeling that I also relate to, because there’s a memory there, something attached to them, that I can’t forget. A time. A place. An event. Some sort of imprint or impression that never came off, something that still lives inside somewhere, either snapshotted and preserved, or having grown into something else.
They reflect some sentiment within me back at me in a way that strengthens and empowers that sentiment. In the case of Broken, those reflected feelings are immediately obvious to me: defiance, resolve and a refusal to go against my own wishes for the sake of someone else’s expectations, in particular when it comes to my own artistic path or output. Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t act like you get it when you don’t. Don’t blow smoke up my ass now and then later try to cash-cow me against my long-term best interests. In essence, Broken is a resounding “fuck you.” Actually, make that a capitalized “FUCK YOU.”
Really, I never stopped to think about this until now, but speaking of moments that I never forgot about … there is a very distinct memory …
Late fall. 1992. Eighth grade. I was at a school friend of mine’s mom’s place, and I was all about grunge and alternative, I was all about thrash, I was just getting into Death (the band, not the genre), I was more than all about weird shit like Primus and Faith No More and Bad Brains. I, however, had zero knowledge of industrial music.
All I knew was that this guy Trent Reznor wore fishnets on his arms, and that there was a lot of leather, and chains, and eyeliner, and black clothing, and chicks that looked like they could beat my ass in an alley and look hot doing it before going home and conducting rituals.
All of those are incredible things in hindsight. However, at the time, Pretty Hate Machine, and the band, and the cyberpunk meets S&M aesthetic that was un-relatable to a prepubescent 12-year-old dirtball from inner-city Baltimore, had kinda blown right past me. This soon changed…
This shouldn't come as a massive surprise to any Dillinger Escape Plan fans, considering the band covered "Wish" as a part of its 2006 covers EP Plagiarism.
