The Year 1994 - The Twin Peaks of Nihilism

In terms of popular culture, 1994 was quite a remarkable one. It was the unofficial 'year zero' for Britpop, with the release of Oasis' 'Definitely Maybe' and Blur's 'Parklife', as well as genre-defining albums such as The Prodigy's 'Music for the Jilted Generation', and films such as 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The Shawshank Redemption'.

In amongst all this, it only recently occurred to me that 1994 also gave rise to two musical touchstones of creative nihilism from two disparate entities, that I believe have yet to be surpassed. Manic Street Preachers' 'The Holy Bible' and Nine Inch Nails' 'The Downward Spiral' are, two decades on, as dark and impenetrable as any albums ever made and marked a pivotal culmination point for both bands, linking the two together in a helix of hostility.

The concept of nihilism - essentially the 'negation of negation' - was first propagated in Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons', although its sacred text is widely accredited as being Dostoyevsky's 'Notes from Underground', a book that would resonate like seismic tremors of self-hatred and anguish through the layers of cultural strata, from the philosophy of Nietzsche to the existentialism of Sartre, Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver', Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange', J.G. Ballard's 'Crash' and the music of the Sex Pistols.

Nihilism as a philosophic concept involves the rejection of all moral and virtuous concerns, judging them as futile and irrelevant in the face of the crushing absurdism and oppression that the world represents. The romantic notion that often attaches itself to such advocates lies in their elusiveness, their lack of adherence to the mundane fatuities of the everyday, and the sense that from Dostoyevsky's 'underground man' to Camus' 'l'etranger', by repudiating the moral rules that compel us to aspire to fulfilment in favour of self-destruction they have arrived at a semblance of true freedom.

The post-war generation breathed a heavy sigh of new life into the concept of nihilism, as societal conventions slowly crumbled away into the birth of rock 'n' roll and James Dean's 'rebel' which encapsulated the era of the 'teenager' for which nihilism appeared custom made. The nihilistic phase is a legitimate rite of passage and those who haven't undergone it, I don't believe ever really were teenagers, just ready-made adults heated through by the microwaves of puberty as opposed to undergoing a tortuous and thorough hormonal thawing out.

Both 'The Downward Spiral' and 'The Holy Bible' pulsate with subversive and disturbing themes of alienation, anger and a seething malaise that screams of hopelessness and animosity.

'TDS' stands as a loose narrative of one man's solipsistic disintegration, inspired by Pink Floyd's concept album 'The Wall'. 'THB' explores subjects of exploitation, cultural decay, the horrors of addiction and genocide, and right-wing totalitarianism. Both albums are abrasive, represent a considerable challenge to first-time listeners, but also yield an astonishing depth and thematic strength that merits revisiting.

It is important to contextualise the respective abysses being explored by examining the separate paths that lead there.

Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails exploded onto the American scene with 1989's 'Pretty Hate Machine'; an album that perfectly amalgamated subversive industrial music by artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Skinny Puppy and Einsturzende Neubauten, with the new-wave electronica of Gary Numan and Depeche Mode. Modern industrial music was thus born. Mired in subsequent record label disputes, and extensive touring it would be five years before 'TDS', with only the release of an excellent but all-too-brief 'Broken' EP interrupting the productive hiatus.

Manic Street Preachers, a band of four outsiders from the Welsh mining town of Blackwood, had burst onto the music scene with their bombastic 1991 debut 'Generation Terrorists', a compound of 80's 'hair metal' bravado such as Guns n' Roses, and the self-aware rock intellect of The Clash. With songs like 'Motorcycle Emptiness' and 'You Love Us', the Manics encapsulated an ethos of 'culture, alienation, boredom and despair', with a mission statement being to sell millions of records before spontaneously combusting into the dust of rock legend.

Courting controversy by dressing as terrorists, wrapped in leopard-skin furs and lipstick, the band quickly attracted a cult following, largely attributed to the enigmatic Richey Edwards, the band's chief lyricist and sometime rhythm guitarist. Indeed, with the hindsight of Edwards' mysterious disappearance and assumed death, its hard not to consider him a latter-day Syd Barratt, albeit singing songs about anorexia rather than mice called Gerald.

Similarly to Nine Inch Nails, the Manics' difficult sophomore album 'Gold Against the Soul' was given a lukewarm reception, fuelling a broiling sense of tour-weary depression going into the creation of 'THB'.

Both bands approached their third albums with considerable notoriety flying albatross-like within close proximity. Nine Inch Nails had provoked outrage with the 1992 release of the ‘Happiness in Slavery’ video featuring reportedly genuine footage of sado-masochistic torture. This, alongside the news that Reznor had chosen as a recording base for ‘TDS’ (apparently in ignorance), the Hollywood Hills house in which Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and friends were brutally murdered by members of the ‘Manson Family’ in 1969.

Meanwhile, the Manics’ disturbingly self-destructive aura had been sealed in blood by perhaps the most exquisite nihilistic statement since Van Goph cut off his own ear. Talking to journalists after a particularly gruelling gig, Richey Edwards proceeded to carve the epigraph ‘4 REAL’ into his forearm in response to the artistic credibility of the band being called into question.

‘TDS’ opens with the jackhammer onslaught of ‘Mr Self Destruct’, setting the sonic benchmark for all that follows. ‘Piggy’ is a bare-bones piece of industrial grime, in which Reznor repeats “nothing can stop me now", before collapsing in on itself with a cavalcade of drums. Both ‘March of the Pigs’ and ‘Heresy’ are bone-crushingly intense, before the dirty sleaze of ‘Closer’, perhaps one of the most orgiastic songs ever released by a white rock act. Synths, fuzzy guitar lines and conflicting drum beats build up in the climax like the throes of sexual fervour.

‘Closer’ is the crucial lynchpin around which the album is structured, offering as it does some semblance of relief - in contrast to the subject matter, musically it is album’s ‘poppiest’ track – before being plunged back into the discordant maelstrom of ‘Ruiner’.

‘THB’ opens with ‘Yes’, a song about sexual exploitation and the boundless limits of consumerism, that lays the textural framework for the rest of the album. Richey Edwards’ lyrics are so dense and sesquipedalian, with multiple references often jostling for dominance in each line that singer James Dean Bradfield frequently has a tortuous job vocalising them within the melodic confines of each song. The aesthetic of the music brings to mind Brutalist architecture with its jagged edges and uncompromising rigidity; the guitar riffs are often jarring and dissonant, the rhythm section taut and muscular.

The dominating track on ‘THB’ is ‘Faster’, an adrenalized thrombosis that the Manics have never surpassed; the lyrics invoking the intelligentsia of Plath, Pinter, and Mailer, whilst declaring ‘I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing’.

‘Archives of Pain’ builds around a menacing bass line and concerns the morbid cult of fascination around notorious figures, name-checking Hindley and Brady, Le Pen and Nilsen, and written from the perspective of a right-wing extremist advocating capital punishment and retributive judgement - ‘give them what they deserve’. On ‘4st 7lb’, Edwards’ lyrics describe the torment of his psychosomatic battle with anorexia, epitomised by the exemplary line ‘I wanna walk in the snow, and not leave a footprint’.

The quality of the production throughout both albums is such that twenty years on they sound as innovative and contemporary as anything released in the interim years. On ‘TDS’, Reznor mines genuinely unnerving aural territory to create wholly original sounds – the screaming loops on ‘The Becoming’ invoking the arrival of the apocalypse itself; the susurration of insects; the ear-splitting drum blasts of ‘Eraser’, and so on. The zenith of epic industrial metal could be said to be ‘Reptile’, with sounds so inorganic and devastating that they invoke the image of a colossal factory system in the process of disintegration.

Similarly, ‘THB’ is suffused with audio samples from J.G. Ballard, Hubert Selby Jr., a mother of one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims, and Orwell’s ‘1984’, that shuffle in and out of the songs lending thematic dynamism.

The penultimate track ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ incorporates audio recording of the Nuremberg Trials with the mechanical puffing and panting of some kind of dehumanised production assembly line. It is as cold and oppressive as the album gets, and to me always sounds like a band almost cogently aware of their impending demise as a creative unit. Closing the album with the quite inconsequential ‘PCP’ has always felt like a misstep to me, as though self-consciously the band felt it necessary to make a small retreat from the necrotic and suffocating chill that had infused the album’s bones.

Despite the equal measures aggression and despair that course through the veins of both albums, there are equally moments of genuine beauty and respite. ‘A Warm Place’ on ‘TDS’ blooms into colour like a palliative, providing a temporary yet comforting numbness, with ethereal textures that wouldn’t be out of place on a Brian Eno album. It is one of the finest pieces of music Reznor has produced and without it as an interlude, ‘TDS’ would be a far less effective piece of work.

Of course, there is little that hasn’t been written already about ‘Hurt’, an anthem for the disenchanted, appropriated in the cultural consciousness by Johnny Cash, that still lays a finger on every raw nerve of emotional potency and is a breathtakingly poignant close to a ferocious monsoon of an album.

‘This is Yesterday’ from ‘THB’ is, similarly, a melancholic break in the dark clouds with shimmering guitar and yearning vocals that invoke ‘the only way to gain approval is by exploiting the very thing that cheapens me’.

The parallels between the two albums is also worth noting in the context of the subsequent impact on the bands’ respective trajectories. Following ‘TDS’, Reznor became further ensconced in addiction and depression that prevented the release of another album until 1999’s sprawling ‘The Fragile’. After heavy touring in the wake of ‘THB’, Richey Edwards disappeared, leaving his car parked on the Severn Bridge (a notorious suicide spot), securing his place in rock mythology as the mystery surrounding his whereabouts continues to inspire conjecture.

Despite the rest of the band continuing as a 3-piece, progressing on to have huge success with anthemic, mainstream albums 'Everything Must Go' and 'This is my truth, tell me yours', I have long thought that the legacy of the Manic Street Preachers would have been best left at 'THB'. To my mind, they should have continued under a different name as the members of Joy Division did subsequent to Ian Curtis' death, becoming New Order.

Twenty years on, the Manics' have maintained a prolific output of new material with varying degrees of artistic success. Whilst 2004's 'Lifeblood' was widely panned, I appreciate it inasmuch as it demonstrates a band dabbling in alternative directions. Whereas, 2009's 'Journal for Plague Lovers', which was warmly received, strikes me as a band desperately reaching back and trying to recapture the black magic conjured up on 'THB'.

By contrast, Trent Reznor's output post-millennium has been much increased and consistently worthwhile, constantly seeking to remain at the vanguard of the contemporary music scene. 2007's 'Year Zero' was an astonishing exercise in electronic (and marketing) experimentation; the instrumental double-album 'Ghosts' was similarly captivating, rich and diverse in scale; whilst his Oscar-winning soundtrack for 'The Social Network' was propulsive and engrossing.

Twenty years on, what is incontrovertible is that these two albums represent a very high watermark in the marriage between music and nihilism; which, as the waters have receded have left very few comparable peaks in their wake.