Word: spiral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wrinkled cotton shirt and a grungy pair of jeans, Reznor blends in so easily with the bohemian types streaming past him on a Greenwich Village sidewalk that it's easy to forget he is the auteur behind one of the landmark albums of the decade, 1994's The Downward Spiral, as well as an architect of the dark offshoot of heavy metal and punk called industrial rock. His themes of alienation and distress have influenced artists from Marilyn Manson to Oliver Stone. This week Reznor is making a return with a challenging new album, The Fragile (Nothing/Interscope), a work that...
...Downward Spiral's impact still reverberates through the rock world. Its raging guitars and walloping percussion are more aggressive than anything that came before. The record was a Kafkaesque critique of an industrial world filled with poison-spewing factories and desolate, ruined people. Its harrowing music, for better or worse, established Reznor and his band, Nine Inch Nails, as one of the few fresh voices rock has produced since Kurt Cobain. But in the view of some social critics, its X-rated imagery made Reznor the spiritual sire of school violence and corrupted youth...
...Fragile has very little fat on it, and in the age of the Backstreet Boys, it courageously dares to not pander to radio. The album has an organic feel, with little of the machine-like velocity and crushing density of Spiral. Reznor leaves breaks in the sonic wall this time, allowing the songs to breathe. He drives home a subtle message of uplift by filling the open spaces with soft, surprising textures rarely found in rock: cellos, violins, a ukulele here and there, and a tinkling piano--many of those played by Reznor himself, who also does most...
...longer does the threat of a midterm draw students to class. Section quizzes on lecture material mean not a thing. Forever gone are hand cramps, loose-leaf paper, lost pen caps and spiral notebooks; a syllabus to follow the reading material and a computer with Internet access provide a more compact and complete explanation of the course...
Ever wonder what going online was like before the dawn of the World Wide Web? Sinha offers an intriguing look at his spiral into Net addiction during the 1980s as he gets sucked into intense role-playing games and meets eccentric computer-virus writers and fellow Net addicts. Along the way, he discovers that experience is equally "real," whether online or in the flesh. While the blurring of reality and illusion is not a new theme, Sinha's rich narrative and thoughtful observations propel this engaging memoir...