| "Down in It" | ||||
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| Single by Nine Inch Nails | ||||
| from the album Pretty Hate Machine | ||||
| Released | September 15, 1989 | |||
| Recorded | 1989 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 3:46 | |||
| Label | TVT | |||
| Songwriter(s) | Trent Reznor | |||
| Producer(s) |
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| Nine Inch Nails singles chronology | ||||
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"Down in It" is the debut single by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on September 15, 1989. Taken from the band's debut album Pretty Hate Machine , it was the first song ever written by frontman Trent Reznor.
The song's outro contains lyrics referencing the nursery rhyme "Rain Rain Go Away". In 2010, Reznor admitted that the song was his attempt to make a rip-off of the Skinny Puppy song "Dig It" from the 1986 album Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse . [4]
Initially released only on vinyl, a CD version of the single was later created after the success of the album. The first track on the single edition, "Down in It (Skin)", is the mix found on Pretty Hate Machine. The cover art is very similar to Joy Division's first album Unknown Pleasures , with Joy Division always being cited as an influence by Reznor, and Nine Inch Nails later covered the Joy Division song "Dead Souls" on the soundtrack to the 1994 film The Crow .
Around the time of the single's release, the band lip-synced a performance of the song on the dance music show Dance Party USA . [5] The footage, originally thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2012 and went viral after being uploaded to YouTube. Reznor responded to the video on his Twitter account, stating that the band had decided to appear on the show after deciding it was "the most absurd choice [they] could come up with at the time" for a television program on which they would be interested in performing, but were surprised when they were actually booked to appear on the program. [5]
The single was included in the 2015 Record Store Day–Black Friday exclusive box set Halo I–IV . [6] [7]
A music video for "Down in It" directed by Eric Zimmerman and Benjamin Stokes, filmed on location in the Warehouse District of Chicago, was released in September 1989. It includes special effects applied to scenes such as a television set falling down forwards and backwards, writing in lights, and strobe flashing. In the video, Reznor runs to the top of a building while Chris Vrenna and Richard Patrick follow him. The original version of the music video ended with the implication that Reznor's character had fallen off the building and died, an effect achieved by covering him in corn starch made to look like injuries. MTV edited the scene out of all airings. [8] To film the ending of the video, Zimmerman and Stokes used a camera tied to a balloon, with ropes attached to prevent it from flying away. [9] Minutes after they started filming, the ropes snapped and the balloons and camera flew away; after traveling over 200 miles, the contraption landed on a farmer's field in Michigan. The farmer later handed it to the FBI, who began investigating whether the footage was a snuff film portraying a person committing suicide. [10] [11] The FBI identified Reznor, [12] who later remarked, "Somebody at the FBI had been watching too much Hitchcock or David Lynch or something." [13]
Reznor stated the following in an interview with Convulsion Magazine:
There was a scene w[h]ere I was lying on the ground, appearing to be dead, in a Lodger -esque pose and we had a camera with a big weather balloon filled with helium hooked up to it ... the first one we did, we started the film, I was laying [sic] on the ground and the ropes that were holding the balloon snapped, the camera just took off into the atmosphere ... the camera landed two hundred miles away in a farmer's field somewhere. He finds it and takes it to the police, thinking that it's a surveillance camera for marijuana, they develop the film and think that it's some sort of snuff film of a murder, give it to the FBI and have pathologists looking at the body saying, 'yeah, he's rotting,' (I had corn starch on me, right) 'he's been decomposing for 3 weeks.' You could see the other members of the band walking away and they had these weird outfits on, and they thought it was some kind of gang slaying. [14]
The investigation ended when Reznor's manager demonstrated that Reznor was alive and the footage was not related to crime or satanism. [10] [15] This story was covered by the news magazine show Hard Copy on their March 3, 1991 episode. [16] Reznor did not enjoy the show and said, "Total junk gossip exploitative journalism. That was the icing on the cake: getting on the worst TV show in America." [13]
The single edition of the song was largely panned by AllMusic reviewer Christian Huey, who described the two remixes included as inferior to the original. Since all three tracks were later released on the "Head Like a Hole" single, he labeled the "Down in It" single as "completely superfluous and useful only to NIN completists". [17]
"Down in It" has been covered by Eric Gorfain, The Meeks, Dead When I Found Her, Sasha, and Tiga.
A remix of "Down in It" was used in an early 1990s Gatorade television advertisement. Originally, "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson was to be featured in the commercial, but Jackson declined the offer. Reznor unsuccessfully sued the production company who created the commercial for copyright infringement after he saw it in 1993, accusing them for illegal use of the song without permission. [18]
The song's lyrics share similarities with those of the 2005 Nine Inch Nails song "Only", from the album With Teeth . The opening verse of Down in It contains the lyric "Just then a tiny little dot caught my eye," [19] while the second verse of Only opens with the lyric "Well, the tiniest little dot caught my eye." [20] In "Only", Trent elaborates on what that dot was ("a scab trying to seal itself shut"), while both songs also include several references to personal growth and change: "fading away" from the kind of person the protagonist once assumed himself to be and an uncertainty as to who they will inevitably become.
All tracks remixed by Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Down in It" (skin) | 3:48 |
| 2. | "Down in It" (shred) | 6:56 |
| 3. | "Down in It" (singe) | 7:03 |
| Total length: | 17:47 | |
| Chart (2001) | Position |
|---|---|
| Canada (Nielsen SoundScan) [21] | 185 |
The Downward Spiral is the second studio album by the American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on March 8, 1994, by Nothing Records in the United States and Island Records in Europe. It is a concept album detailing the self-destruction of a man from the beginning of his misanthropic "downward spiral" to his suicidal breaking point. The album was a commercial success and established Nine Inch Nails as a reputable force in the 1990s music scene, with its sound being widely imitated, and the band receiving media attention and multiple honors.
Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated as NIN, stylized as NIИ, is an American industrial rock band formed in Cleveland in 1988. Its members are the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Trent Reznor and his frequent collaborator, Atticus Ross. Reznor was previously the only permanent member of the band until Reznor made Ross an official member in 2016. The band's debut album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), was released via TVT Records. After disagreeing with TVT about how to promote the album, the band signed with Interscope Records and released the EP Broken (1992). The following albums, The Downward Spiral (1994) and The Fragile (1999), were released to critical acclaim and commercial success.
Michael Trent Reznor is an American musician. He came to prominence as the founder, lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and primary songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. The band's line-up has constantly changed, with Reznor being its only official member from its creation in 1988 until 2016, when he added English musician and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross as its second permanent member.
And All That Could Have Been is a double album by the American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on January 22, 2002, by Nothing and Interscope Records. The live album contains music recorded during the Fragility v2.0 US tour in 2000. Disc one is a live album of most of the band's normal set list of the time, while disc two contains a studio album titled Still, containing "deconstructed" versions of previous Nine Inch Nails songs and some new material. The double DVD set, sold separately, includes video recordings of the songs performed on the CD, as well as additional song performances and footage from the tour.
Pretty Hate Machine is the debut studio album by the American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released by TVT Records on October 20, 1989. Frontman Trent Reznor sang and performed most of the instruments, also producing the album alongside Keith LeBlanc, John Fryer and Flood, with a few other contributors.
The Fragile is the third studio album by the American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released as a double album by Nothing Records and Interscope Records on September 21, 1999. It was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and the English producer Alan Moulder, a longtime Reznor collaborator. It was recorded throughout 1997 to 1999 in New Orleans.
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Fixed is the second extended play (EP) by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. It was released on December 7, 1992, by Nothing, TVT, and Interscope Records. It serves as a companion release to Broken (1992), and includes remixes by Coil, Danny Hyde, JG Thirlwell, and Butch Vig, as well as then-live band member Chris Vrenna.
"March of the Pigs" is a song by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails from their second studio album, The Downward Spiral (1994). It was released on February 25, 1994 as the album's lead single.
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"We're in This Together" is a song by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails released in 1999. It is the 15th official Nine Inch Nails release and is a single for the album The Fragile. It was released as a three-disc single.
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"Sin" is the third single by American industrial band Nine Inch Nails from the album Pretty Hate Machine. Released in October 1990, the song peaked at number 35 in the UK Singles Chart.
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