CERTIFIED HOOD CLASSICS #1 Nine Inch Nails ”Broken”
We’re launching a brand-new series for this blog. Once a month, I will publish stories of albums that, for various reasons, were overshadowed by other creations of otherwise known artists, but nonetheless deserve recognition. For the first piece in this series, we’ll look into the fascinating history of an underrated EP by industrial rock pioneers Nine Inch Nails. Hope you’ll enjoy.
PART 1 ”AFTER EVERYTHING I’VE DONE I HATE MYSELF FOR WHAT I’VE BECOME”
The year is 1991, after the sensational commercial success of Nine Inch Nails’ debut called Pretty Hate Machine (released in 1989), Trent Reznor - the band’s frontman and main songwriter is… frustrated. The label wants him to double down on the synth-pop elements of the first album with its follow-up. Reznor, however, knows that the 80s have come to an end, and alongside this transition, the music is evolving as well. Nine Inch Nails’ current label, TVT Records, is relentless and says it won’t release anything even remotely different from Pretty Hate Machine. The silver lining to this ongoing feud comes in the form of Jimmy Iovine - a legendary producer who by this point worked with artists such as Patti Smith, Tom Petty & Heartbreakers, John Lennon, Dire Straits, and Stevie Nicks. As a joint venture with Atlantic Records, Iovine has just founded his record label called Interscope, which became interested in signing the up-and-coming industrial rock band from Cleveland, Ohio. Reznor, who has absolutely no idea about Iovine’s philosophy and previous work as a producer, is understandably mistrustful while thinking about the potential trade. He worries that the circumstances will change from bad to worse; he doesn’t know, however, that Interscope promises to give ”complete creative control” back to artists. Sceptical, yet completely furious with his current label, Reznor decides to take Iovine’s offer. After months of legal battle, it was decided that a new EP by Nine Inch Nails would be jointly released by TVT and Interscope, and by early 1992, recording started.
The choice of the recording location is quite prophetic when it comes to the content of Broken and its follow-up, The Downward Spiral (1994). Reznor decided to rent up 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, the infamous property in which Sharon Tate was gruesomely murdered by followers of Charles Manson. He made a makeshift studio in the house and named it Le Pig (quite obvious reference to Susan Atkins writing the word ”pig” on the front door with Sharon Tate’s blood after the murder). Quite shocking so far, isn't it? I believe that every creative decision behind the Broken EP was dictated by Reznor testing Iovine whether he was just talking shit with this ”artists regaining creative control over their projects” narration, and boy, oh boy, did he test it. The choice of a recording location isn’t even the most controversial thing about this project, but one thing at a time.
PART 2 ”FRESH BLOOD THROUGH TIRED SKIN”
The first track, Pinion, starts the EP with a distorted loop gradually increasing in volume; the listener gets a feeling that something’s in the air, just waiting to explode. Then it all hits us with the second track called Wish, the band plays power chords with the speed of a machine gun, all instruments are covered in extremely thick effects that create a claustrophobic wall of sound, the lyrics are masochistic and also to some extent mocking towards the anguish experienced by the creator, as one can see here:
I'm the one without a soul
I'm the one with this big fucking hole
No new tale to tell
Twenty-six years, on my way to hell
Suddenly it becomes brutally clear what emotions were driving Reznor’s creative process on this project - almost indescribable anger, feeling like a prisoner in the industry you’ve dreamed of becoming part of when you were younger, ubiquitous unfulfillment that’s present even whilst being on top of the game, striving for authenticity when everyone expects you to make your work commercially safe and so on and so forth. Desperation as a result of these worries reaches its peak in this tormented but glorious chorus,”Wish there was something real. Wish there was something true”.
The themes I’m describing here are further enhanced by a music video created for this track, in which we see Nine Inch Nails performing in a large cage while hordes of fans in a barbaric trance try to get in to get a piece of the band. It looks like a scene from the Mad Max franchise, and was incredibly fresh and provocative for its time. It is a beautiful relic of perhaps the most experimental era in the history of music videos. The ending scene in which fans break in with bats and clubs was edited by MTV for being ”too violent”, but despite small changes, Reznor’s uncompromising message remained striking as planned.
The next track, Last takes some inspiration from hard rock/glam school of writing riffs, but as Reznor hated bands of his age creating in these genres, it’s obviously run through his psychotic thoughts and is obligatory distorted into oblivion. Fast whispery pre-chorus contrasting with the rest of the track increases the claustrophobic vibe created by the preceding tracks.
The peak of the feeling of being locked in a situation without a way out comes with the following track, with its on-point title Help Me I Am In Hell. The breakneck tempo of Broken slows down for two minutes to create an uneasy feel in the listener with its haunting and echoing riff, and it fades out to a muffled sound reminiscent of a heartbeat.
Happiness Is Slavery, the most known track from the project alongside Wish and Gave Up, is like a ceremonial killing of the sound known from the Pretty Hate Machine, funky, dancy synths reminiscent of New Order and Depeche Mode seem to punch through the distortion, but unavoidably they have to die. Lyrically, Reznor takes almost direct shots aimed at his former label that tried to boot him up into something he never intended to be with words:
Human junk, just words
and so much skin
Stick my hands through the cage
of this endless routine
Just some flesh caught in
this big broken machine
We end the original line-up of songs with the nihilistic Gave Up. Whispers of a broken (no pun intended) man whose hope is dying that Reznor delivers on verses directly smash into utterly terrifying screams of the chorus and outro. The safe-for-work version of the video for this track was recorded in the aforementioned Le Pig studio on 10050 Cielo Drive and features a special appearance by pre-Antichrist Superstar Marilyn Manson who delivered backing vocals and rhythm guitar for this performance.
Broken also featured two bonus tracks, a cover of Adam and the Ants' song Physical (You’re So) and Suck which was originally released by a supergroup Pigface whose ridiculously fluid line-up once included Reznor. They are incredible reworks that bring new life to those songs, but since they are not fully original material that was first released on Broken, I’ll not get into a detailed analysis of them here to save some space in this already lengthy piece. Go and give them a listen, though, they are worth a try if you enjoyed everything Broken had to offer so far.
PART 3 ”NOW THERE’S NOTHING MORE FUCKED UP I COULD DO”
It’s impossible to talk about this EP without mentioning the infamous long-form Broken music video from 1993. Directed by Peter ”Sleazy” Christopherson, a performative industrial artist. As part of his performance, Christopherson once nailed a head of his penis to a board while the song If I Had a Hammer played in the background, and that’s how Reznor heard about him… so yeah, I guess that was the best possible guy for the job given what we’re dealing with here. Alongside Christopherson who helped Reznor to conceptualise the Broken music video, our little crew of masochists recruited Eric Goode, Serge Becker, and Jon Reiss to direct individual segments of this notorious movie.
Alright, that’s enough of the background about who is responsible for this creation, but the important question is - what specific content made Broken unsuitable for release at the time, and why was it ultimately shelved? Reznor’s idea for this music video was to emulate the feel of a snuff film. Here’s an explanation of what a snuff film is for those who, unlike me, aren’t clinically online reading about the disturbing media. Snuff film or snuff video is a type of movie made for commercial profit that depicts real scenes of rape, murder, suicide, or sometimes all of the above. Snuff films create a sort of underworld economy cause, for obvious reasons, they can’t be legally distributed and are only available for the perverts who look for them. So it was a genius move from Reznor to film something so utterly fucked up that there was no way that it would ever be played on MTV or played anywhere, to be honest, thus causing it to fall into this underground world of shady VHS tapes. Reznor made a bunch of bootleg tapes that he distributed in his circle, each with a different camera glitch, so he could later identify which cut it is when it will unavoidably leak. It was considered”lost media” for a while, then it was traded in the underground, and finally it was uploaded to YouTube in all of its compressed glory, caused by years and years of homemade copying. All of these things resulted in an unprecedented mythological status of the Broken movie, fulfilling Reznor’s original plan.
We start the video with the black-and-white scene of an execution by hanging, no introduction, no dialogue, just a man being punished for his crimes. After a minute or so, we abruptly switch the setting to a suburban neighbourhood with a camera work that is close to the amateur quality of homemade family videos. We see a young man who is visibly worried approaching the person who’s filming, and then again, we abruptly switch the setting to a garage. The young man is tied and gagged at this point, sitting on a chair, his torturer in a mask made of human skin is preparing for his ”work”, he turns on the TV, the aforementioned music video for Wish plays.
After that, the killer, while looking directly into the camera, repeatedly rewinds the part of the video when Reznor screams ”fist fuck” (that’s a subtle foreshadowing). The next segment is for the song Help Me I am in Hell. We see a man calmly consuming his meal despite being covered in flies. This segment is more surrealistic than creepy. After a brief comeback to the garage where the victim’s teeth are being removed by the killer, we see the Happiness In Slavery segment. Some industrial machinery is working on full throttle, Reznor sings while being locked in a cell, a man is being plugged into some perverted BDSM machinery, we can see that he is visibly amused by his body being subjected to all sorts of injections, cuts, and pinches. He is eventually turned into a pulp of raw flesh, with Reznor being in charge of the machinery in the end. Short shot of a young man being hanged by his hands in the garage from earlier, and we enter the grand finale, the most controversial sequence. The victim is mutilated, cut, tortured, fist-fucked in all sorts of ways, all of which is synchronised to the breakneck tempo of Gave Up. We get some shots of people gathering around the crime scene outside of the killer’s house, and along the way, we get some visual suggestions that the killer eats all of the unfortunate souls that land in his garage. We finish the movie with the execution of a killer via hanging; he dies with a smile on his face, proud of all the sadistic pain that he caused.
Cannibalism, grotesque violence, BDSM sexual perversions, full-frontal male nudity, extensive execution sequences, all of this in the aesthetic of a real snuff film, create a disturbing viewing experience unlike any music video in history.
(WARNING DO NOT WATCH THIS IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH, WHILE EATING OR AT WORK!!!!)
PART 4 ”I HAVE FOUND YOU CAN FIND HAPPINESS IN SLAVERY”
Some might say Reznor pushed the limits of creative expression allowed by Interscope too far, and that’s a valid opinion. Many people like me who are interested in making art see Broken and its accompanying music video as an ultimate middle finger aimed at record labels. It’s a triumph of artist defiance over slavery of conformity and well-digestible over-produced music. It’s a raw essence of what Nine Inch Nails is in its most inaccessible form.
Exploring one’s shadow and darkest thoughts has nearly killed Reznor. Shortly after the release of Broken, Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral, a concept album about self-destruction. During its aptly named Self-Destruct Tour, Reznor got heavily addicted to drugs and got involved in the rivalry with Marlyn Manson over who would cause the most chaotic, mindlessly violent antics in hotel rooms. He eventually got sober after some time in rehab and was able to tell his tale in his following projects. Broken is often overlooked by the press and Nine Inch Nails fans due to the commercial and cultural impact of its successor, The Downward Spiral, which often gets all of the attention. Despite its inaccessible character, two songs from this EP have received a Grammy for Best Metal Performance; those songs are Wish and Happiness In Slavery. For me, Broken is the single most important Nine Inch Nails project, one that pushed limits of what is acceptable in the art world, and in many ways popularised the industrial scene. The absolute rage that fuelled Reznor during this era is something that resonated heavily with Generation X, in a similar manner to the impact of Nirvana’s Nevermind. It’s crazy to think that artists such as Reznor and Kurt Cobain were considered mainstream in the '90s. I mean, can you imagine them being confronted with the reality of music promotion in 2025? The label executives would be like ”Yeah, Trent, the project is fire, but can we produce some short-form content for TikTok, y’know, for the kids? Maybe some viral dance or something”. EPs such as Broken simply wouldn’t happen in 2025 as they would be considered too dark, too graphic, too grotesque for mass audiences. Broken with all of its brutality, terror, frustration, anger, rage, despair, and BDSM perversions is an important milestone in music history, the essence of the alternative 90s during which tormented visionaries modelled the mainstream landscape with the craziest ideas. That’s why the Broken EP can easily be considered the Certified Hood Classic.
