Nine Inch Nails: sharper than you know

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Too often, news that a rock star whose debut album came out 20 years ago is coming to Taiwan can unfortunately mean that someone needs to pay the mortgage. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor — who plays here Aug. 12 for the first and last time — is a refreshing deviation from that trend.

Reznor’s stubborn refusal to sell out is coupled with a drive to aggressively experiment with levels of public interaction using the most modern forms of media, making him more relevant as an artist today than ever before.

“It makes me feel complete when I do it,” he said. “It’s nice to have fame and I’m not going to bullshit you, it’s nice to not worry about the gas bill — and I’ve been there — but I’m not interested in making money.”

Nine Inch Nails’ Wave Goodbye Tour sees a more balanced, positive frontman firmly in control of his music and his brand. The lyrics from Head Like a Hole: “Black as your soul/ I’d rather die than give you control,” are realized in his current business model — you can’t steal his music, he’s giving it away.

‘ROBOTS ON STAGE’

The newest Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, is available as a full-length download, free of charge, on the band’s Web site (www.nin.com). Reznor split with his record label, Interscope/Universal in 2007 (which now only has the option of putting together a greatest hits compilation) and encourages other artists to do the same.

“If you are trying to change the world,” he said, “what [blows] your mind? What movies, books, music does that? If you just want to be a rock star or be on MTV and show how much shit you have, do whatever is big right now and sell it.” This is not something he is interested in, and never has been.

Reznor has even posted torrents on Pirate Bay of the masters of songs so people can remix them. The album With Teeth has multitracks available to this end. Ghosts I-IV was released with a video contest in which people could make sound tracks out of the instrumental music. Despite his power-to-the-people mentality, however, Reznor’s own sound tracks, for Lost Highway and Natural Born Killers, may be hard to live up to.

Midway through an intensive tour schedule, Reznor still has the energy to crack jokes, though he wasn’t positive where he was calling from (Madrid). When asked how he has the stamina to perform night after night, he said: “Actually it’s robots on stage. I rarely go up there myself.”

Though in the early days, “playing live was the reward for all the agonizing over the music,” these days “it’s reversed,” and he prefers to be in the studio doing the “more important work, creating and sculpting” the music. The performance side is “execution,” he said.

Reznor said he is “stopping Nine Inch Nails as a touring entity” after he completes his current tour. He wants time to work on other projects, most notably a television series based on Year Zero, a concept album released in 2007.

Set 15 years in the future, the album broke the mold for interaction with fans through a V for Vendetta-style genre game without a main character — or, rather, with players in the alternate reality game created around the album becoming the main characters. Reznor teamed up with 42 Entertainment, best know for Halo 2, to create the interface, which he said was “easily the most creative and fun collaboration” he had ever done.