fixed

i was in ninth grade when i heard nine inch nails for the first time. i was still in the closet. i wore flannel shirts from awful places like eddie bauer and land's end. i didn't wear my flannel the cool way, the way it was worn by the legions of "alternative rock fans" i'd join in a few years: my shirts, including my yaga shirts, were tucked into my tapered jeans. every morning i put gel in my hair and combed a severe part into it, way over on the left of my head. i was my mother's son and a mixed chorus teacher's dream, and i completely hated myself.

when brandy smith, a girl whom all my other friends and my mother hated, loaned me broken, i shut the door to my room and put it in my sanyo with the volume turned down. i couldn't let my parents hear what i was listening to. i stood there, head close to the speakers, and was introduced to a rage unlike anything i'd ever heard. lyrics like "this is the first day/of my last days/built it up now i'll take it apart/climbed up real high now fall down real far/no need for me to stay/the last thing left/i just threw it away/put my faith in god, put my trust in you/now there's nothing more fucked-up left to do" made perfect sense to me. something was wrong with my life; i was dating a girl named ginger but jerking off thinking about a guy in my math class.

nine inch nails just worked for me. trent reznor was the first singer i'd heard say things like "how'd you get so big/how'd you get so strong/how'd it get so hard/how'd it get so long?" here he was, a man fucking with the accepted norm of gender and sexuality, and it turned me on. i laid in my bed, late at night, listening with headphones to trent sing "i am a big man/yes i am/and i've got a big gun," aroused and confused. maybe the fact that i was (am?) so turned on by this sadistic, hard sexuality should tell me something. maybe i don't want to know.

all of this history is so that i can say this: nine inch nails' new album, with teeth, came out last tuesday and i've been obsessively listening to it since then. i'm a different person now, so where can this album fit into my life the way that broken or the downward spiral did? i don't really want to kill myself anymore; i'm not a nihilist and i don't have blue hair. i drive the speed limit and i've quit smoking. nine inch nails, however, doesn't seem to have changed all that much. with teeth is the album that should've come out about seven years ago, and it sounds like it. trent still sings lyrics like "i can't remember how it started/but i know exactly how it will end." do i still have the angst and rage that drove me to listen to this music ten years ago? it's in there somewhere.