Nine Inch Nails album:
The Downward Spiral | Year Zero
- Hard-to-Adapt Work: This is likely why the planned HBO TV adaptation died in Development Hell after Reznor failed to find the right writer to execute his ideas. The album's story is basically a Scrapbook Story assembled from a series of now-defunct websites, emails, phone numbers, and even a live event (the Open Source Resistance meeting with the NIN performance cut off by the police raid). Details archived on nin.wiki include a timeline
of a 15-year chain of events that was becoming increasingly more reliant on alternate history until 2022 eventually came and went. The titular "Year Zero" is only six weeks long, has a lot going on around the same time, is largely reliant on internet usage, and is only resolved by sending information back in time that made the audience in 2007 prevent the Bad Future from happening simply by receiving the information. This works for an Alternate Reality Game like the one that promoted the album, but is harder to translate into a medium where more conventional storytelling is expected. - Narm:
- "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.
- "God Given" has a rather unfitting Audience Participation line in the middle of its lyrics.
- Values Resonance: Despite the album being made as an extrapolation of the Bush administration, Headstuff's reflection of the album ten years later shows the album's disturbing parallels to the Trump administration:With Donald Trump in office and in our minds every day, with white nationalism surging David Duke celebrates, with climate change denial having a new day, Trent Reznor’s deepest fears that are so methodically documented and illustrated through the lens of dystopic science fiction are now becoming more realized than ever, and Year Zero seems like a fitting soundtrack to our current times a decade later. If he released it now, we’d call it on the nose, but as a document of once-imaginary extensions of fears, it’s a sobering, frightening artifact from a time that reminds us that all of this was predictable, that our current mess should not come as a shock.
