alt.music.nin is a thing that existed, and you can imagine that the release of the fragile was a pretty big deal there. it was the first nin record released in the internet age - the first chance to discuss something new.
in fact, it hit the place like an explosion from friendly fire. giant arguments erupted, quickly giving way to a strange kind of silence. people that had been posting regularly for years couldn't even be bothered to post an opinion. i realized later that it was the first of what were several generational shifts in trent reznor's following. it actually seems to happen after every record. my shift out was "with teeth".
personally, i have a complex relationship with the disc, but this isn't a review of the fragile. it's an explanation of my remix of the track's first single, the day the world went away.
the single was released a few months before the record. people were posting remixes almost as soon as it was released. i actually didn't want to, but i had a few requests so i approached it on that level.
i wasn't entirely sure what to expect from the record, which it seemed like i had been waiting for my whole life. trent had been obfuscating and coy. it was hip-hop. it was orchestral music. it was prog. it was pop. i was just waiting with an open mind. the single didn't help form expectations: two versions of a mopey ambient thing, and a frighteningly awful tongue-in-cheek stadium rock dig at marilyn manson (who i gave zero fucks about, except in the context of him reducing reznor's songwriting quality). how does one approach this?
no. i didn't want to. "c'mon, i wanna hear your interpretation". fuck. fuck. no.
i listened a few more dozen times. i had aged five years, but the lyricist hadn't. i wasn't really connecting to it. but, the musician had aged fifty years and i was connecting to this. the production was.....actually really thin.
strangely.
musically, he had a good idea, but the execution struck me as completely botched. or, maybe, just minimized by record executives? either way, i decided i could make this thing bigger, more epic and more powerful.
that's the central idea in my reconstruction. i just wanted to take the idea in the original track and make it more dramatic.
i got a better response from this than i've ever gotten from anything else. randoms accused me of leaking a track, or even secretly being trent reznor (ok, those accusations were mostly not serious). many people admitted they liked my version better than the single version. i had such a huge spike at my mp3.com page (remember mp3.com?) that some of the tracks hit the top ranking in their categories. inri: mp3.com industrial rock superstar.
my plan was working! finally!
i can't tell what kind of feedback i got on the site. i had forgotten my password, and the site didn't have a mechanism to recover it. they got bought by some huge company soon after (i think it was vivendi) and all the indie artists got kicked to the curb.
drats. foiled....
recorded in the summer of 1999.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-inri-messed-the-world-up