On "Year Zero," he's reaching beyond his usual fascination with personal (or interpersonal) torment to confront group dynamics -- specifically, politics. But he's still most skilled at evoking the way the mind works in isolation.
This is where the multitiered experience of "Year Zero" intersects with the worldview it presents to show how pop music can communicate in a new way. The isolated experience of politics is ideology -- the personal, even isolated, absorption of a set of beliefs. Embracing an ideology is a lot like playing an alternate reality game. You commit; you move where the rules lead; you risk failure if you doubt the path.
The usual model for political pop is to state ideas or conviction in an anthem or a ballad -- to foreground meaning over experience. But hard rock has always been more about body-shaking physical possession than words.
On "Year Zero," Reznor attempts to explore the physical experience of political ideology -- how it feels to believe, or to rebel. His soldiers and subversives and faithful idiots speak in bromides, but the music, embedded with dissonance and sudden squalls of beauty, gives each character his own imperfect, powerful voice.
Factor in the listener's experience of "Year Zero" on the Web and in community with other fans, and you have an event that bowls over the boundaries of the usual pop release.
Reznor promises to continue the "Year Zero" project into a new recording, and possibly a feature film. I hope he opts against that second option and sticks with more innovative forms.
Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.
At the very least, Trent Reznor is still creating chaotic rock 'n' roll. And that's more than marketing; it's pioneering art.
\o7 **
Nine Inch Nails
"Year Zero" (Nothing)
\f7 ****
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ann.powers@latimes.com
