Awesome Music: If you can get past the melodrama, quite a bit. Most fans admit that the lyrics can enter the state of narm pretty frequently (the chorus of "Where is Everybody?" especially), but the music itself more than makes up for it. There's enough great, fascinating music that it now has its own page.
A big contention among fans is whether any of the albums post-With Teeth are as good as the ones that came before. A lot of the contention comes from the fact that the lyrical content and especially Trent's vocal style are vastly different than The Downward Spiral and The Fragile (1999).
Hardcore fans debate on whether or not Rob Sheridan's departure from the NIN Camp as a visual part of the band degraded its imagery. Most people feel Trent has done well without Sheridan but most feel Sheridan's abstract, eye-catching, and at times glitchy art style added more to NIN's music. The lack of information as to why Trent and Rob don't work together anymore also doesn't help, although this was cleared up in a Reddit AMA where Rob explained his reasoning for leaving the NIN camp was due to issues in his life hampering his work (mainly divorce and personal life situations beyond his control) that lead to him leaving, as well as Los Angeles for his mental health.
Whether the original or Johnny Cash’s cover of "Hurt" is better. Despite Trent loving Cash’s version many fans are still split. Contrastingly enough, Cash fans seem to appreciate both versions, with many others feeling each version has different merits that at least make both worth a listen regardless of preferences.
Chorus-Only Song: When it comes to remembering the lyrics of "Closer", the "I want to fuck you like an animal" chorus is significantly more likely to come to mind than any of the other lyrics.
NIN's version of "Physical" is now more famous than Adam Ant's original.
Just as Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" is now more famous than the NIN original. Even Reznor himself admitted that Cash's version was better than his own.
Critical Dissonance: The remix album of The Fragile, Things Falling Apart, was detested quite severely and harshly by critics upon release to the point where NME gave the album a bad review but then ended by giving it a 10/10 as a joke, but most NIN fans agree that the album isn't all that bad.
Discredited Meme: The infamous "Red robe meme Explanation (NSFW)A picture of Trent floating around of him wearing nothing but a red robe, lifting it up to his leg and a bit of his pubic hair. Essentially the NIN fandom's equivalent to goatse.cx." has come under fire in the 2020s, as posting NSFW images of people without their consent receives a higher level of scrutiny than it did in previous years, and the fact that Trent (who had relapsed around the time the photo was taken) appears to be either drunk or on drugs in the picture itself. Former guitarist Richard Patrick commented on an Instagram repost of the photo to say that he's pretty sure that Trent himself wouldn't appreciated seeing the photo again.
Live guitarist Robin Finck has always been the most popular member of the live band, and his return for both The Slip and Hesitation Marks was met with happiness from the fans.
The demos of unfinished/rejected Hesitation Marks tracks from the deluxe version interview. Especially the first and second one.
"And All That Could Have Been" - not the live album, but the song from the companion EP Still - is an extremely popular somber piece among the fanbase, and a frequent entry on "Best Songs Never Played Live" lists.
In terms of guitar riffs, "Wish", "Heresy", "March of the Pigs", "Starfuckers Inc.", "My Violent Heart", and "The Warning".
And not just on the guitar. The bass riff shared in the songs "Into the Void" and "La Mer" are arguably some of the most memorable from the rhythm section.
The drums for "Eraser" and "You Know What You Are?", the latter courtesy of one DaveGrohl.
Also on The Fragile (1999): "Somewhat Damaged", "The Day the World Went Away", the piano riff in "The Wretched", "We're in This Together", and "Just Like You Imagined" are all fantastic examples.
"Still Right Here", after a few minutes, has a massive guitar riff slowly fade in and get louder and louder before the electronic breakdown, sounding like someone playing it from the top of a ravaged building. And it is DAMN epic.
Fandom Rivalry: With Ministry. Ironically enough, Reznor is friends with Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen.
There's a lot of tension between Nine Inch Nails fans and Radiohead fans, of all things. This is manly one sided bashing/memeing from NIN fans, however.
Fan Nickname: The way Trent enunciates the Title Drop in "With Teeth" led fans to coin the jocular nickname "AWITH ATEETHA!"
The NIN fanbase has crossed roads with the fanbase of Queens of the Stone Age because Trent collaborated with them for QOTSA's 2013 album, ...Like Clockwork, and the two bands toured across Australasia as co-headliners the following year.
NIN fans are surprisingly welcoming to those who have discovered the band through Lil Nas X's sampling of them and people who discovered them through Johnny Cash.
NIN fans generally get along well with David Bowie fans, and vice-versa, thanks to the two artists' collaborations with one another during the '90s. The fact that Bowie and Trent Reznor were fans of each other's works even before they met (to the point where Bowie's Low influenced NIN's The Downward Spiral, which in turn influenced Bowie's Outside) only further bolsters this.
Fridge Brilliance: The "imperfect loop" at the end of "The Background World" has 52 iterations, each decaying slightly and becoming more distorted. Trent was 52 years old at the time of the recording. The entire sequence thus comes across as a statement on aging. A rare case of an insightful YouTubecomment (by Scott Sparkman) may add further to the fridge brilliance behind the song:
The reason people feel "uneasy" with the some 52nd loops is that there is a 1/10th pause in-between each sequence. Apparently, there's a musical science to this uneasiness people feel while listening to the loops.
My friend, who was a musical theorist in college, listened to Background World and said that this is a very unusual pause, as it cuts off the musical bar before finishing the bar, only to start back at the beginning. It's a very sudden, unnatural stop in music and the ear picks up on it quickly. He said this "bar gap" leaves the listener feeling as if there was one or two more musical notes to be played, "ghost notes", yet the notes never play.
To not be able to hear those last few ghost notes, topped with the fact that each new bar becomes increasingly granular due to the drop in Hertz, gives the average listener a sense of anxiety. My friend said that Reznor and Ross did all of this deliberately. They want the listener to feel an encroaching fear.
Growing the Beard: While Pretty Hate Machine is beloved, many think that NIN started to really come into their own around Broken or The Downward Spiral.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The music video for "Came Back Haunted", which was directed by David Lynch, features quite a bit of imagery reminiscent of the third season of Twin Peaks, which would air four years later. Combined with the fact that they lyrics could easily be applied to Agent Cooper's story in that season, it almost sounds like a retroactive Filk Song for the show.
Trent has a quite a bit of Ho Yay with protege Marilyn Manson, much to the joy of Slash Fangirls everywhere.
Trent used to make out in public with Richard Patrick, the first live-guitarist, whenever they wanted to get rid of someone. They also had the habit of jumping on each other during live shows.
The fact that Richard's nickname was 'Piggy' also puts several songs on The Downward Spiral in an entirely new light.
To say nothing of Trent's relationship with his long-time assistant and roommate, Chris Vrenna, who was probably the closest thing NIN ever had to another official member until 2016.
Hype Backlash: Hesitation Marks got this with audiophiles after Reznor released an audiophile master of the album, free for anyone who bought the main album off the NIN website. Then the waveforms were examined, with clipping still obvious on the audiophile version, and the dynamic range of both versions were measured: The main version comes in at DR5. The audiophile version: DR6. Excitement quickly changed to backlash for releasing something as "audiophile" when it was not.
It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Around the Broken era, NIN were gaining more popularity and some original fans decided they were getting too "mainstream".
Trent himself believed in this trope after the band hit it big with The Downward Spiral, being disillusioned with things like other bands imitating his sound.
SUCK MY ENTIRE COCK!Explanation Trent's response towards a disgruntled fan who criticized the short length of Bad Witch. This has become popular shortly on r/nincirclejerk mentioned above.
THE Nine Inch Nails! ExplanationDuring Twin Peaks's return in 2017, the infamous Episode8 had an appearance of the project at the Roadhouse. Fans took delight at the fact they were called "The Nine Inch Nails", arguably a Running Gag towards those who think it's a band in the common format. Became an Ascended Meme when Trent added "The Nine Inch Nails" to his Twitter bio.
Ron ZertnertExplanationA very odd Sdrawkcab Name that originated on r/NIN, where the screenshot of a comment from r/Music claimed that Trent Reznor's name is (literally) Ron Zertnert in backwards. This resulted in jokes including a rather amusing parody of "Hurt" featuring lyrics like "I zert merserf terday. To see if I steer feer".
A minor one is, "Died. Said 'fist fuck' and won a Grammy."explanationThe song "Wish" has the line "fist fuck" in it, and Trent Reznor won a Grammy for the song, joking that the phrase is what this is what his epitaph will read.
Editing other album covers and even movie posters to say "Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral", similar to the "Every album is Sweet Emotion" meme.
"Fuckit. I just bought a LOT of Viagra."ExplanationA tweet from Trent Reznor, after a previous tweet complaining about how his email inbox was full of nothing but Viagra promotions.
Misaimed Fandom: Truly epic amounts of this surrounding The Downward Spiral as a whole. It's basically Trent exploring his nastiest impulses (hedonism, violence, Rage Against the Heavens, etc.) for 14 songs and exploring how things would end if he actually gave in to them (hint: not well).
To elaborate further, the song "Closer" from said album has one of the most notorious reputations in music history. What was meant to be a song darkly deconstructing the concept of Sex for Solace as another harmful impulse is now one of the most popular song choices at strip clubs.
"Closer" can drift into this territory if you happen to mistakenly hear the chorus' first line as "I wanna fuck you like an Elmo!" You might try to listen to the song without picturing Elmo laughing in the background and cracking up.
The line "I wear this crown of shit..." from "Hurt". Johnny Cash decided to change it to the more effective "crown of thorns" for his cover of the song.
"The Wretched" might as well be the embodiment of Narm.
The clouds will part and the sky cracks open, and god himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just t-t-to hold you down. Stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss...
The repetetive Title Drop chorus of "Starfuckers, Inc." can be hilarious after listening to it for a while, but you can also pretend that Trent Reznor's house really looks like in the song's music video.
The way Trent pronounces the Title Drop in the chorus of "With Teeth" is so bizarre-sounding that fans came up with the Fan Nickname of "AWITH ATEETHA."
"God Given" has a rather unfitting Audience Participation line in the middle of its lyrics.
Come on, sing along, everybody now!
"Capital G": "Ah-Push-ThaBut-tonAnd-Elec-tedHim-ToOf-ficeAnd-AH-HePush-ThaBut-tonAn-ADrop-Thuh-Bomb-HUH-HUH" straddles the thin line between Awesome Music and Narm.
A large portion of the lyrics — especially those from The Downward Spiral and The Fragile — often play up the angst factor all its worth. Most fans love the songs anyway.
"Hurt" is this through and through. The lyrics are extremely Wangst-y... and yet they still really work anyway, especially if you've dealt with severe depression or know someone suffering from it.
The "Pinion" video shows a dirty flushing toilet connected to a network of pipes that ultimately deposit into the mouth of someone in a black rubber suit strapped to a wall, either feeding the waste to them or drowning them in it. Either thought is equally unsettling to imagine.
The video for "Help Me I Am in Hell" shows a man enjoying a meal of steak and wine...in a room full of thousands of flies.
"Happiness in Slavery", the most (in)famous video, shows a man stripping naked and situating himself in a device that graphically eviscerates his body (inducing both great pain and pleasure), including ripping off his penis, and ends with the man being ground to provide fertilizer for a garden of some sort.
And for that matter, the Broken movie. It's made to look like a real snuff film, complete with a decaying, grainy shot-on-video aesthetic and lots of Jitter Cam. Besides that, it features the killer slicing up a random victim he has strung up by his hands, dousing him in gasoline possibly fisting (FIST FUCK!) and/or defecating on him, and at the climax, chopping off his penis and (for lack of a better word for it) fucking the stump before hacking him up with a chainsaw.
"Head Like a Hole" (whose title is dropped as the chorus' first line) is sometimes referred to "Bow Down" or "The One You Serve" or "Got Money" (itself a mishearing of the line "God money").
"Wish" is prone to being mistakenly called "The First Day of My Last Days".
"Closer" is sometimes referred to as "Help me" (the most repeated line in the song) and "I wanna fuck you like an animal" (the most obvious and memorable line in the chorus). "You get me closer to God" (the chorus' last line, which is closer to the actual title) is also included, which is not helped by the fact that the single featuring remixes of the song (plus one of said remixes) is called Closer to God.
While "Wish" and "Closer" at the very least contain their titles somewhere in the lyrics, "Heresy" is most applicable to the trope, as it does not contain the word anywhere in the song and often gets referred to by a line from the chorus — "God is dead" (or "Your god is dead").
"Piggy" prominently repeats the line it's commonly misattributed as its title ("nothing can stop me now") at least twenty times, and only utters the actual title twice in the first verse. "Nothing can stop me now" is also used as a subtitle in a remix of the song.
Signature Song: "Closer" is the top candidate, but "Head Like a Hole", "Wish", "Hurt", "Happiness in Slavery", "March of the Pigs", "The Day the World Went Away" and "The Hand That Feeds" are also common. 2017 additionally threw in "She's Gone Away" due to its appearance in Twin Peaks.
"The Warning (Stefan Goodchild & Doudou N'Diaye Rose Remix)" and "The Mark Has Been Made" appeared in Need for Speed: Undercover.
"1,000,000" and "Discipline" (both from The Slip) appeared in Midnight Club: Los Angeles. They were later used as the first and final boss themes, respectively, in Hi-Fi RUSH.
"The Hand That Feeds" appeared in Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition.
Downplayed, but a heavily modified, instrumental version of "Closer" is used in the opening credits of Se7en.
"Hurt" is used in the ending of the second season of Rick and Morty.
"She's Gone Away" got this after a full performance of it was featured in an episode of Twin Peaks — though apparently, the song was specifically written to be used on the show.
"Just Like You Imagined" was used in promos for 300.
"Eraser", including its remixed version "Eraser (Denial; Realization)" was used in one TV spot for 300: Rise of an Empire.
"We're in This Together" was used in the official trailer for The Avengers (2012).
"Into the Void" was used as the background music for Warframe: 1999.
Upon release, fan response to The Fragile was rather lukewarm despite strong reviews, most likely because it wasn't as heavy as The Downward Spiral and didn't have a song with a chorus as memetically popular as "Closer". However, a few years later, fans started to judge it on its own merits, and many now consider it to be the band's best. Trent seems to have picked up on this.
"The Fragile is weird because when it came out it felt like everyone hated it to me, and now it feels like it's everyone's favorite album, fan-wise."
With Teeth also appears to be gaining more and more popularity nowadays. When it came out, it was considered one of the band's worst to date. Some fans, however, think it's a good album to introduce others to — because, let's face it, most of Trent's discography is a bit too far on the 'weird' end of the scale for people to get into easily despite his success — and recently, it appears to be earning more credibility and more people are considering one of their favorites now than there were back then.
Win Back the Crowd: A number of NIN's early 2010s releases had received mixed reception from fans. Not the Actual Events and Add Violence have been almost universally beloved.
where Rob explained his reasoning for leaving the NIN camp was due to issues in his life hampering his work (mainly divorce and personal life situations beyond his control) that lead to him leaving, as well as Los Angeles for his mental health.
