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pitchforkreviewsreview

Nine Inch Nails' "The Fragile" by Brent DiCrescenzo, 9/21/99"

Pitchfork Score: 2.0

I can’t even begin to explain what’s wrong with this review.

Actually, I can.  And I will do so with great relish and satisfaction.  This one is almost too easy.

Admittedly, Nine Inch Nails isn’t always the easiest band to swallow.  Trent Reznor’s music is far from cheerful, is often abrasive, and is more often than not saturated with disdain.  Apparently he is—or was—a very unhappy man, which was very clearly reflected in his music.  If anything else, the man is honest as fuck, and despite the flaws his music may or may not have, you cannot deny that he is true to himself, and said honesty is perhaps the most admirable thing about him.  DiCrescenzo’s review of NIN’s 1999 double album plays out like a tragic nightmare, one of those horrible dreams that traps you in chaotic turmoil no matter how hard you pinch yourself.

The most tragic aspect of this review is its disjointed outline.   DiCrescenzo takes meticulous care in alerting the reader of the timeline in which he experienced The Fragile for the first time (or first several times, as the noted times seem to span a period of at least two days).  The whole thing plays out like some sort of cocaine-fueled diary entry, reeking of the kind of juvenile simplicity one might find in the early chapters of a Judy Blume novel.  There are multiple points in which one can’t help but wonder if DiCrescenzo even listened to the album at all, despite his desperate attempts at proving that, in fact, he did so.

The Fragile is an album that finds strength in its simplicity.  Sure, the lyrics aren’t going to win Trent Reznor a Pulitzer anytime soon, but the orchestration alone is something worthy of a significant amount of praise.   DiCrescenzo spends most of his time debasing the lyrical content of the album, yet at times he has no problem laying into Trent’s composition skills.  Clearly DiCrescenzo has no grasp on the spectrum a genre of music like industrial music can span, such as when he refers to tracks like the eerily symphonic “The Day The World Went Away” as a ‘constipated drone,’ or when he describes the haunting, piano-driven crescendo of “La Mer” as ‘plunky.’  He writes, “It’s not the gentle ambience of it, though, since this loud sludge could knock out a speed addict.”  Judging from the plunky, constipated “structure” (I use the term very loosely) of this review, it seems like he may have some firsthand experience in that field.

This review is hilariously ironic because the majority of it is no more than a sloppy laundry pile of greasy, spit-stained insults glued together haphazardly in a futile attempt to resemble an informed review of an album.  DiCrescenzo, in the midst of babbling on about what stoplight he’s waiting at, or what made-up soundtrack to some pretend sequel to The Crow he’s compiling, and his eloquent explanation of musical meter (“1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4”), deigns to demean Trent Reznor’s lyrical prowess with zingers like “Ooh, wow, did he just say ‘fuck?’ Trent, Holden Caulfield rubbed that out 50 years ago,” “Trent, you are Flock of Seagulls,” and “Trent Reznor is Chris Gaines.”  Ouch.  He even gives instructions on how to use a computer thesaurus to find synonyms for the word ‘decay’ in an effort to illustrate Trent Reznor’s supposed lack of vocabulary.

It’s hard to take someone seriously—especially any sort of critic that is strapped with the task of reviewing a lyrical piece of music—when they are so blatantly stumbling over their own words as they try to articulate how bad someone else’s writing is, especially when they use tired metaphors (i.e. referring to something arduous as an ‘albatross.  Hello, 1935).  Also, trying to insult The Fragile by describing it as a combination of Broken and The Downward Spiral—two of the best albums ever produced—is absolutely ludicrous.  Even if it were true—which it is not—it reads more like a compliment than a disparagement.  Crueler still is DiCrescenzo’s physical description of Reznor himself—a recovering heroin addict—as a “a steadily plumping, thirtysomething recluse.”

This review is a joke—I’ve actually laughed out loud several times reading it—and it boggles my mind that any editor in their right mind would allow something so atrocious to be published.  Then again, DiCrescenzo’s editor—or his moral compass, at least—may very well have been expelled from the same drug-addled, hellish wormhole that this garbled litterbox of a review appeared out of.

The Fragile may not be the perfect album, but it’s far from terrible.  The “journalist” who wrote this review (whose last published article on Pitchfork was in 2004, which may mean Pitchfork actually may have done something right if they in fact fired him) clearly took very little time exploring the album’s content.  Instead of analyzing the actual conceptual elements of the album, pertaining to both the lyrics and musical structure, the reviewer picks out random samples of lyrics that stand out as distasteful and unhinged when not placed within the proper context.  The reviewer—in his cyclonic “literary” manner—reaches for every seemingly clever simile comparing the songs on this album to household nuisances and acidic bodily fluids.  Calling a song “fuzz” or “crust” is far from informative, and hardly reflects positively on the credibility of the writer.

As far as the conclusion to the review, the state of confusion I am left in is almost what’s to be expected to be honest.  If I had sniffed as much cocaine as this guy apparently had, there’s still only a 10-15% chance that I might begin to grasp the point of this review.  Obviously this guy hates this album, and that’s totally valid.  But tearing down someone else’s writing in writing, while implementing the poorest excuse of grammatical/syntactical structure I have ever seen, is 100% Grade A bullshit.

DiCrescenzo states at the end of the review that he is “angry, hungry, and frustrated,” and I suppose I am too: I’m angry and frustrated (basically the same thing) because someone actually got paid to fart out this piece of verbal diarrhea.  I’m hungry too, because that’s totally relevant to Nine Inch Nails.

Oh, wait. It’s not. Imagine that.

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