Year Zero = 2022 = 2007 + 15

Nine Inch Nails front man, Trent Reznor, is becoming very political. MTV banned a performance by the band on their music awards show when the last album came out, because Reznor wanted to have a huge back drop with President Bush's picture on the stage.

The tour for the previous album, With Teeth, continues in Europe while fans scramble to understand "the meaning" behind his upcoming album Year Zero. To give you a sense of how elaborate the flurry has been, visit the Wiki site for NIN here. The excitement began when fans noticed certain letters/number standing out on their tour shirts. People read off the "highlighted" letters to find websites, numbers corresponded to phone numbers. Calling the phone numbers supposedly allows you to hear a conversation taking place in this dystopia, but it is only 15 years away.

In addition to these supplements to the album, concert goers have discovered small USB drives at four concerts. The drives contained a track from the album and sometimes an image which revealed a new website. Currently, four tracks have been officially "leaked" and one track was played on KROQ, so it has made it's way around the internet, too.

Year Zero is a 16 track album, and five tracks have been leaked. If you remember The Downward Sprial, you probably remember that as the best by Reznor. Sure, The Fragile was a good album, especially since it contained several instrumental tracks. With Teeth is not a great album. The lyrics are cheesy and very predictable. For instance, complete the following lyric "about to reap what ..." Did you finish it naturally with "you sow"? That's right! Many of the lyrics from With Teeth and Year Zero have this quality, and it is very annoying.

One of the things I have noticed about Reznor is how he tends to use very simple rhyming patterns and, as a result, very simple language. There are problems with this combination. Mainly, it's really boring--he's written better lyrics in the past. If you are going to rely on this basic lyric structure, at least make the lyrics less predictable. Throw in a few clever words, so we can feel like you had something worth saying. Instead, Reznor gives us very unclear ideas that often sound like an inarticulate, depressed high school student who seems to always find a place for the word "strife" when writing poems for school.

Suppose we give Reznor the benefit of the doubt and assume that his word choice is deliberate. What then? His words are very colloquial. Maybe he is trying to write from the people's perspective rather than his own, which seems to have started with The Fragile, where he sounded less selfish and more interest in someone else. He's claimed that Year Zero is supposed to be about the perspectives of many people in this future reality. Perhaps so, but I doubt it. The last song, "Zero-Sum," better be really impressive to remind listeners that he can write good lyrics. This could be like reading the Dilsey section of Faulkner's book The Sound and the Fury. After reading tons of writing that's purposefully bad for artistic reasons, Faulkner writes the last section with all the stops pulled out. It's an incredible conclusion for the book, and it vindicates Faulkner's writing abilities if you ever had doubts. Anyway, Year Zero has the potential, because the song preceding it, "In This Twilight," is, lyrically speaking, "better" (just not in a Faulkner sense) than the others that have leaked.

The song "Survivialism" has a cadence that reminds me of Marilyn Manson's (Brian Warner) lyrics. In fact, the phrase "I got my violence/in hi-def ultra-realism" sounds a like a line from Manson. Honestly, an interesting album would be Reznor primarily doing the music with Warner's lyrics. A taste of that occurred in the past with Manson's album Antichrist Superstar, triggered more parents around the world to scorn Manson for obvious, but probably superficial, reasons. That's a topic for another day, and I'll probably never attempt it.

In short, the music on Year Zero sounds a little new, but there is a lot of what Reznor has already written that remains. It isn't very new, but there are some catchy tracks, so far. We'll have to wait to hear the whole thing in April.