Tattoo – further thoughts (Part 1)

Since posting about my tattoo, I’ve dedicated some time to thinking about exactly what I would like to get. Don’t get excited, because I don’t know yet. But if you’re interested in reading into my thoughts so far on the matter, please keep doing so.

I have been collecting various images for inspiration – most of them official wallpapers from the various albums of NIN. I also have some official tour photos, some amateur tour photos, and some other interesting imagery. I have been thinking, though, that perhaps I don’t want to get a NIN tattoo – perhaps I want one that is about something more general, like industrial music, or even just music itself. However, these categories seem even more daunting to contemplate than just NIN.

I can tell straight away that I don’t think I would like to tattoo myself with something generic like industrial music – it’s too broad. Besides, it would imply that I love industrial music as a whole. I do not. I appreciate many fine artists whose work could be tentatively considered industrial music, but as a whole I do not love the genre itself. I don’t even fully agree with the naming of the genre. That rules that out.

As for music … well, once again I’m getting the whole ‘generic’ vibe here. When I say that I want a NIN related tattoo, it’s not necessarily something like a NIN logo. It’s more about capturing some of the emotions, beliefs and thoughts that are played in my mind’s eye, inspired by the music that NIN create. It would be wrong for me to get a “music” themed tattoo and simply declare that “I love music”. It’s like saying “I love air”. Well, of course I love air. I need it to live. I hold music in the same reverence – I do not worship music as a whole, but I cannot live without it.

However, as I sit here listening to Fear Factory’s Hatefiles album; an album full of some of the best industrial music I’ve heard, I am wondering if perhaps I am artificially limiting myself by desiring to choose something that is only NIN-related. But, even now as I think about it, the emotions and thoughts that I associate with NIN are also associated with Fear Factory and the like, but I believe in a different way.

Some time passes…

However: after listening to Fear Factory for some time this evening, I come to the conclusion that what I think of them, while many of their tracks are energetic, fun, and help me to concentrate on some of my darker emotions – mostly anger, and in some cases hate – these are not the emotions that I wish to get tattoo’d permanently onto my skin. Fear Factory is really great to go absolutely FUCKING SPASTIC to, but they’re not what I’m after in a tattoo. At the moment.

I want my tattoo to have some deeper meaning … something that Fear Factory doesn’t provide. Oh, sure, I still get angry, and I still feel what I believe is akin to hatred toward certain things, but these feelings no longer occupy as much of my time as they once did, back in my angsty teen days. At the moment, Nine Inch Nails’ music provokes some of the deepest emotional exploration I’ve yet to experience from any music. Artists like Cog, Karnivool and Tool also provide deep, emotional investigations, but these artists are relatively new to me, and I would not commit myself to loving them as much as I do NIN just yet. With Cog and Karnivool, both new bands, I am yet to come to rely upon them as a whole – having only released two full albums each, I cannot yet know whether or not in the future I will surely enjoy their music, and I cannot yet know, more importantly, whether I fully agree with the sentiment expressed in future music. I don’t feel as though they’re yet old enough, as an entity, for me to base such a pivotal decision upon.

Tool has released many albums, but I don’t like all of them… not yet, anyway. I am slowly coming to appreciate their older material, but I am presently fixated mainly on Lateralus and to a lesser extent 10,000 Days – both extremely complex and technical albums, while their older material, from what I’ve heard (which is admittedly limited), is not less technical, but more raw – which is not a bad thing. I haven’t yet come to appreciate it.

So, that leads me then to trying to explain about why I like NIN so much – there isn’t a NIN song that I can’t listen to. Sure, some of the tracks from Pretty Hate Machine and With Teeth aren’t my favourites – PHM because, as with Tool, the sound is raw, and Teeth because it doesn’t take the same format as most of NIN’s other work. A quote from Trent Reznor himself:

About five or six songs into writing it, the songs started to sound good on their own and they didn’t need this framework to work together,” and that With Teeth consists of “a collection of songs that are friends with each other, but don’t have to rely on each other to make sense”, however, the album’s narrative arc describes “a difficult journey that begins with a nightmare and ends with acceptance of a new reality.” (source)

And from the July 2009 issue of UK Kerrang! magazine, talking about With Teeth:

The first recorded (sic) by the newly sober Reznor he later described it as a “cautious” album, one that he admits wouldn’t be his “favourite NIN record today”. “Looking back, I can see I wasn’t completely sure of myself,” he said. “[After] I got sober… I took a few years just trying to stay alive and feel comfortable in my own skin before I jumped back into work to possibly fail.”

So, there are some songs that I am not a great fan of. That isn’t to say that With Teeth is not an important album in NINs history and discography (without it, we may not have had Year Zero or any of the following albums!); merely that it is not my favourite entry. Nor is it Trent’s.

So that’s a little about the songs which aren’t my favourite. How about the ones that are? I honestly don’t know where to start with that – there is so much quality in the NIN discography I am almost overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to discuss it all!

In fact, that’s quite a good thing, really. This article is now already 1100-ish words long. I won’t kill my readers interest with an amateur analysis of music. I’ll just list my thoughts.

I really like the song Echoplex from The Slip. Awesomely, each song from The Slip is accompanied by a piece of artwork. As the discussion on the ninwiki page goes:

The artwork may symbolize someone being surrounded by sound, as if it were echoing around them. It may also symbolize walls around the person, which makes sense due to the lyrics making a reference to sound bouncing off of walls.

The lyrics suggest a scenario where someone has been in solitary confinement for too long, driving him or her, to insanity, where “you will never ever get to me in here.” Another possible scenario is a direct link between the lyrics present on this song and “Demon Seed” (“You feel me breathe” on “Echoplex” vs. “I can hear it breathe”). They could also be extremely literal, referring to the solitude of wherever frontman Trent Reznor comes up with his music.

An interesting facet of the artwork is the red scribbling line which seems to pass through and around the inside of the echoplex – this scratching appears in many of the other art pieces for The Slip and suggests that these songs are somehow interconnected and related. My thinking was that I could have the echoplex artwork as the start of my tattoo. It would represent me and how I interact with the world: from behind the safety and security of my echoplex, I allow a small channel – or, I am forced to have a small channel – of communications to the outside world.

The scratching could represent many specific things (stream of consciousness, blood, physical connectedness), but mostly I see it as communication, with all of the aforementioned concepts coming under the communication umbrella concept.

Thus, I need to decide what satellite concepts surround my echoplex. Some will be directly connected via my communications channel, and others, perhaps not. Also, I am thinking that I will have to expand upon the available NIN artwork repository before I can come up with some suitable imagery. No doubt I will be taking concepts from some of the work present on The Downward Spiral, and perhaps some more from The Slip, but perhaps not so literally. So many of the concepts explored in all of the NIN albums are without existing imagery — I will have to get arty and create my own!