Blog 11 – Music

In general my musical tastes are widely varied. There are some styles that I have a preference for over others, but in general I appreciate nearly all forms of music. One style that I typically gravitate towards is the so-called “alternative” style of rock. One band/artist that I particularly like is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor. For that reason I chose to examine his song ‘Hurt’. Released in 1994, it came at a time in my life when I was going through some personal difficulty. Without going into too much detail I was suffering from depression and struggling with a fair amount of anger and frustration. The song and the mood of the song reflected my feelings at the time, and probably amplified them as well.
It’s a dark song, and comes at the end of an thematic album titled ‘The Downward Spiral’. The focus of the whole album is one of painful introspection and confrontation of personal demons. As performed by Nine Inch Nails, the edgy and electronic, crackling with noise and anxiety. When the song was covered by Johnny Cash in 2003, its atmosphere was principally acoustic, and took on the feeling of power sung from the perspective of a mature man at the end of his life, rather than the anger and frustration of a young man facing a seemingly hopeless future. This time around, helped along by director Mark Romaneks’ video, it seems to place the singer looking back at the folly of his life, reflecting on its vanities. The video brings this vision home, with Johnny Cash seated at a banquet table, declaring it to be an “empire of dirt”, intercut with documentary footage of Cash in performance, playing with his son, visiting what appears to be his own childhood home. Cash appears as the cocky and somewhat dramatic young man who could have easily sung the original Nine Inch Nails version, but now looks back on that with sadness, in what appears to be regret for the wastefulness of that self-absorption.