Knots, Ties, and Lines: “The Downward Spiral” at Thirty

Trent Reznor was stuck. Embroiled in a feud with his label over creative control and royalties, founder and CEO of TVT Records Steve Gottlieb was happy to remind Reznor that their deal was for seven albums, and he had no interest in letting his biggest cash cow walk. So Trent went where many disgruntled East Coasters have gone before: Los Angeles.

Out of necessity, Nine Inch Nails—the band of which Reznor is the primary songwriter and sole consistent recording member—began working on the follow-up to its 1989 pop-industrial debut Pretty Hate Machine in secret. He rented a house in Beverly Hills and built a studio in it so he could peacefully finish what would become the 1992 EP Broken. At some point over the course of that year, Jimmy Iovine of Interscope bought out Nine Inch Nails’ contract from TVT and set Reznor free. He would reward Interscope’s faith in him two years later with 1994’s The Downward Spiral, debuting at the #2 Billboard spot.

The record made good on all the experimental pop promise Reznor had shown up until that point. Its production is deft and layered, weaving electronic and acoustic instruments together to create a record that is both terrifying and narcotic, Pretty Hate Machine’s pop sensibility packaged into Broken’s industrial abrasiveness. A concept album about an addict’s descent into the abyss, Reznor’s lyrics are aggressive, fueled by a bivectored hate that is directed inward as much as it is out, at both the self and the “system.” Thirty years on, The Downward Spiral’s legacy endures in large part for its seamless blending of techno, rock, and ambient to make a work whose dexterous use of the studio emphasizes rather than undermines its raw emotion.

But the record has another legacy, one centered around that house in Beverly Hills. 10050 Cielo Drive was home to Reznor’s studio Le Pig from 1992 to 1993. It had previously been the residence of Roman Polanski and wife Sharon Tate, knifed to death by the Manson Family in her own home. Reznor claims to have been unaware when he signed the lease, but whether that’s true or not, he quickly embraced its history—the name “Le Pig” is a macabre homage to the graffiti the Family left behind in Tate’s blood. This fact has long been a talking point around The Downward Spiral, lending the album’s nihilistic lyrics and sonic violence a hardcore authenticity that eventually made Reznor himself squeamish:

I met [Sharon Tate’s] sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: "Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?" For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, "No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred." I guess it never really struck me before…I realized for the first time, "What if it was my sister?" I thought, "Fuck Charlie Manson." [my italics]

10050 Cielo Drive would be demolished right after Reznor moved out in late ’93, but he’d bring with him a memento: the house’s front door that at one point in time had scrawled across it in blood “Pig.”

Such is the haunted house that birthed this record. With addiction as its topos, Downward Spiral maps self-destruction along the blurred boundary between indulgence and self-abnegation, and along the contours of power in various forms: control through sedation, the power vacuum left in the wake of ideology’s puncture, and the promise of arrival on the other side of letting go. Manson employed similar manipulative tactics to rope in and keep down the lost souls he collected while proselytizing about the freedom found through escaping the doldrums of modern life and consumerism into ego death. Targeting individuals who knew no other way out of their pain than by wearing it on their sleeves, Manson built a literal cult of personality around himself by forcing his followers to down cocktails of acid and speed—a nasty combination that exacerbates paranoia and violent tendencies—in the name of free love and becoming “one” with the world and, more importantly, Manson himself. He would coerce his acolytes into regular orgies, not just for his own pleasure, but also to debase them, grinding their self-worth into dust. There’s a way of listening to the warring narrators of The Downward Spiral—one side continually breaking down, the other incessantly tempting, sexualizing, and berating—as the echoes of an attenuated dialogue between Manson and one of his victims. Reznor was channeling ghosts in a way that he himself may have not even understood.

“Closer,” the six-minute centerpiece of the album’s first half, exemplifies this haunted back-and-forth. Its first verse is the captor speaking, reminding the prisoner that “you let me violate you”; the second verse switches sides, admitting “I broke apart my insides / I’ve got no soul to sell,” with each line interpolated by melodic cries of “help me.” The chorus—famous for its hook, “I want to fuck you like an animal”—makes a tilt-a-whirl of the two perspectives, blending the sides in an abased act of downward transcendence. If sex at its spiritual peak is something like the intertwining of two people into one in an elevated act of communion, whatever is happening on “Closer” is the dirty work of bringing someone to the muddy banks of the River Styx before throwing them in headfirst. Reznor alternates between screaming and singing through gritted teeth on the song’s final chorus, which comes only about halfway through its total runtime: “I wanna fuck you like an animal / my whole existence is flawed / You get me closer to God.” Rhyming “flawed” with “God” might in other situations seem like it was clipped from the margins of a high schooler’s math notebook, but in the context of this song on this record, it’s a porthole into the dynamics of sexual manipulation. The anger in Reznor’s delivery is double in its nature: it embodies the terrifying, insatiable desire of the manipulator to possess their victim entire, just as it encapsulates the desperation of an addict trying to break free from the prison of substance abuse. In both cases, one feeds on another, parasitic through and through.

Listening to “Closer,” I can’t help but think of the images from Manson’s trial, where Sharon Tate’s murderers carved swastikas into their foreheads just as Manson had done to himself, sitting with glossy eyes in front of the judge and jury, looking almost like automatons. The God in “Closer” is flawed, surely, and that’s the crushing tragedy of the situation: even if the Family could have glimpsed Manson for what he really was, it may not have mattered at that stage. The knot had been tied.

The Manson murders are an important inflection point in American history, a stake in the heart to the idealistic but radical political promise of the 1960s. Part of what was so terrifying about the Family members that killed Tate and others was how innocuous their dispositions seemed with respect to the broader counterculture. The trial’s coverage would often emphasize that Susan Atkins & co had been your run-of-the-mill suburbanites before they were corrupted by Manson and the broader cultural values of the hippie movement. That “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” could lead to the crime of the century unfairly brought into focus the decade’s hedonism at the expense of its political legitimacy, even if veins of the counterculture had embraced a certain bacchanalia, nowhere more so than in Los Angeles. In this light, “Closer” takes on another valence, because this song is nothing if not a groove. A techno-disco odyssey that takes off from the simple rhythms of early sampler bands like The Art of Noise, its final three minutes are predominantly instrumental tracks building on top of each other one layer at a time, culminating in a syncopated and sticky acid bassline over blown-out drums. The song is a heater, which is what makes it all the more twisted when you settle your ear down and listen to Reznor’s words, the beat and the beatdown mixing each other up to create a song that is both intoxicating and intoxicated. 

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Before Trent Reznor moved into 10050 Cielo Drive, he was in Cleveland, cutting his teeth cleaning toilets at a recording studio in order to score free sessions to make the demos for Pretty Hate Machine. Cleveland’s rock scene was still centered around post-punk legends Pere Ubu, a band that Reznor admitted in a 2005 interview he didn’t quite understand when he was still living in Ohio (Reznor would go on to appreciate Pere Ubu well enough later in his career, turning a cover of their song “The Final Solution” into a live staple throughout the aughts and early 2010s). Frontman and lyricist David Thomas is a proud descendent of the gangly, acne-speckled rockers of 1960s garage. He’s sensitive to the strangeness of inhabiting a body that doesn’t fit into society, and he expresses this experience through energized if haphazard shapes and sounds, through explosions of libido, through emphasizing the absurdity of the social contracts we sign in everyday life. Pere Ubu takes on Cleveland as a point of pride, making music that embodies the city as it is: a former locus of American commerce and industry, now the living image of deindustrialization’s totalizing and haunting consequences. Between the self and the city, Thomas’s songs are local and concentrated, proudly centering the perverse and the disused without the justification-gymnastics that frequently accompany attempts at “elevation.” In all, Ubu’s catalog embraces the future by embodying the present. There’s no nostalgia, no gestures towards a halcyon era for the Midwest even as the coasts cast down their judgments, seeing the industrial epicenters of yore as nothing more than what they were, not what they are.

Maybe Reznor didn’t get much out of Pere Ubu back when he was living in Cleveland because his music was concerned with a pretty different approach to pain and exclusion. Pretty Hate Machine and Broken are defined by Nine Inch Nails’ trademark angst, which, by the time of The Downward Spiral, is transformed from a boundless animosity into an articulate rage. But even at his most articulate, Reznor’s emotional palette is still one defined by indignation. He throttles against forces more powerful than himself, nearly finding emancipation in the experience of losing out before settling down again in the void. If Pere Ubu is concerned with reveling in life after the Fall, Reznor writes from within the descent. Minutes into The Downward Spiral, Reznor sings on “Piggy”: “black and blue and broken bones / you left me here, I’m all alone / … Nothing can stop me now, / ’cause I don’t care anymore.” This record’s point of departure—and much of Reznor’s catalog, for that matter­—is the end in and of itself; it charts the inertia of entrapment even as it vacillates between the many emotions that such an experience entails. Reznor writes with rage, but his rage isn’t the kind that feels like it might be harnessed into a productive force. Instead, it’s the aftershock of recognizing that something vital is gone and will never be recovered.

Which is why it’s all the more serendipitous that Nine Inch Nails’ crowning aesthetic achievement was made in 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, California. The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies. California’s abundance is never far from environmental disaster, just as it has been a wellspring for political vanguards on either side of the spectrum—birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the psychedelic era, and one-time experimental center of American eugenics. Thomas Pynchon, in a 1966 op-ed about the Watts riots, captures the janus-faced nature of Los Angeles (and by virtue, California) with respect to what the city projects out and what it buries from sight:

Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media…It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.

Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast, a pocket of bitter reality.

Much of the radical political activity of the ’60s was about shattering illusions, whether of race, class, or gender. And for a brief period of time in that decade, it felt like there was real ground to be gained. The potential for collective action to agitate for and force change has never been greater than it was then, however; if anything, there has been a concerted effort to make sure that it doesn’t get there again.

By the time Trent Reznor hunkered down in the Manson house to make a record that is the thematic and sonic embodiment of an extended nightmare, some similarities were already beginning to pile up between the two decades, similarities that underscore the pervasive political stagnation that’s dominated this country since ’69. History moves in cycles, and sometimes those cycles repeat in thirties. The same patterns of violence, both domestic and global, were occurring, though this time without the same level of political resistance. Drug abuse exploded in urban areas (heroin and crack for the two decades, respectively), disproportionately affecting people of color and destroying lower socioeconomic neighborhoods by the dozens. The Watts riots of ’65 and the Rodney King riots of ’92—both of which took place in Los Angeles—ruptured white America’s fictional narratives about racial progress, the brutal realities of systemic poverty, and, most importantly, the nature of policing. The federal government launched secret domestic surveillance programs targeting political radicals. While the CIA’s Project CHAOS and the FBI’s COINTELPRO were by far more evil and effective in their disruption and eventual neutralization of the New Left’s most ardent and militant communities, the latter’s PATCON, whose M.O. was to stop threats from far right, white domestic terrorists, employed monitoring and infiltration tactics that would become integral to the surveillance of American Muslim communities post-9/11. And, of course, both decades featured prominent wars of imperialism, although they individually had very different outcomes, with Vietnam briefly halting the American empire’s ambitions and the Gulf War reinvigorating its most aggressive hubris.

Look at the political realities that came to be in the 1990s through the lens of what America might have been if the projects of the 1960s hadn’t failed, and you’ll find a commitment to indifference and provocation as forms of social control. Enough academic and journalistic work has been done on American intelligence’s relationship to the lines that brought heroin and cocaine in by the ton. While we’ll never get confirmation that these organizations were targeting specific communities, what we do know is that the CIA helped coordinate the Southeast Asian opium trade of the ’60s and ’70s in return for help in fighting the Viet Cong, and employees of the federal government worked closely with cocaine traffickers throughout the 1980s in an effort to stem the tide of communism in South and Central America. The state’s forays into drug trafficking and secret surveillance programs in the ’60s might even be seen as experiments in public and foreign policy that, given their success, were returned to in the ’90s, with the same realpolitik decisions about the worth of an individual citizen against the US’s national security interests domestic and abroad. Between Watts and Rodney King, what had changed for those communities in Los Angeles? What has changed for minority communities across the country since? It’s a static reality—all signifier, no signified.

Reznor’s meditation on addiction and ideology, on surveillance and manipulation, on the cold rage that issues from the loss of one’s present and future self—in the light of these historical synchronicities, all tied together through that house in Beverly Hills, The Downward Spiral becomes charged with the ghosts of America’s political past and present. “You can have it all / my empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt,” Reznor sings on the album’s closer. Taken at face value, this is the mea culpa of an addict reckoning with the bitter reality of their condition. But “empire” is a loaded word, one that’s hard for me to disentangle from where the US was in ’93—refueled and retooled following the fall of the USSR, riding high on the speculative economic optimism of Clinton-era neoliberalism. It would of course turn out to be another instantiation of the emptiness behind the promise of promise, a decade that, just like Pynchon’s LA, “belongs to mass media.” Trent Reznor may have rented 10050 Cielo Drive with the intent to inhabit “this place where this weird part of history occurred,” but he came out with a record that, intentionally or not, is a vector for the cracked illusions that have always and may very well continue to haunt this country.