doing some NIN puzzling
Have you heard the new Nine Inch Nails album yet? No, no, I’m not talking about Ghosts I-IV. I’m talking about “The Slip”. NIN is giving it away for free this time. You can get it here and give it a listen. Another album already! Hasn’t it only been 2 months since the last release?
Yeah, yeah we get it. Mr. Reznor has now become insanely prolific. Starting with the release of “With Teeth” in 2005 there has been 5 releases in 3 years. It use to take him 5 years to release one album. I’m finding myself starting to get nervous about this. What the heck is he doing? Is he just emptying everything off of his hard drive? Will my favorite band not be so special to me if I can get a new album every month? How are we supposed to get albums like “The Slip” burrowed deep down into our souls if we aren’t forced to play them over and over for years while waiting for new material like we did when “The Downward Spiral” came out?
I really listened closely to “The Slip” this morning. It’s a pretty good album. It’s fine. It has some of the same themes, motifs, sounds, beats and ideas that were on “Year Zero”. Come to think of it, it also has a lot of the same stuff from “Ghosts” on it. How does this all relate to “With Teeth”? Thinking a little bit more about it, I finally came to a conclusion.
“With Teeth”, “Year Zero”, “Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D”, “Ghosts I-IV”, and “The Slip” are actually all one giant work. Five different chapters of the same album. It’s an 89 song, 5.7 hour CD that should be listened together as one piece!
I created a playlist on my iPod that has them all collected into one long continuous piece. Actually, I took the remix album off of the playlist so there are 4 albums containing 75 songs, with the whole thing clocking in at 4.5 hours. I listened to the “NIN works” playlist on shuffle while doing chores and was pretty impressed. All of the songs jumbled together work well with each other. It’s a seamless shuffle. I haven’t made it all the way through a 4.5 hour shuffle yet, but I think that’s the way I will be listening to this body of work from now on. It’s way good that way.
With most of our music being digital now, we aren’t held to the same time constraints that were forced on us with having to flip records and tapes over to side two or being held to the 80 minute CD format. Maybe we should be making longer 4 and 5 hour works? Perhaps Reznor, like some crazy classical composer, had it planned out ahead of time that the last 3 years of Nine Inch Nails work should be heard on your iPod or computer all in one sitting.
I have found the behind the scenes stuff with the last 3 years of NIN work really interesting as well. Kind of like a conceptual art project where the actual journey and creation of the piece is where the “Art” is at and not in the final product. The path to the destination is more important than the actual destination.
There has been interesting innovations formed by NIN as they figure out how to get above the dying music industry. There has been new paths traveled down concerning digital music and traditional music distribution. There has been some fun marketing schemes and interesting video and gamer elements tied in. The new remix site has been pretty cool in getting fans to feel like they are part of the creative process. What they have also been doing by pulling everything under the creative commons licensing is also very cool.
I don’t know, it seems to me that there has been a lot of cool exploring, expeditions, and trail blazings going on here trying to plant a flag on the ever moving new world of music entertainment. This is just a glimpse of what our interactive digital world may look like in the future kids!
and…
END WEIRD RAMBLE
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