thevoid99's Full Review: Sin [Single] by Nine Inch Nails
(Note: Originally done on 11/3/00 but now re-edited and extended).
When Nine Inch Nails was opening for noise rockers the Jesus & Mary Chain and Peter Murphy in early 1990, their single for Head Like A Hole was becoming a huge hit in the college circuits while NIN was blowing away the bands they were opening for. Later in the year, NIN had become a big club attraction thanks to Trent Reznor’s stage presence where he would pretty much confront the audience and splash them with water and beating up his own touring band mates, more notably his touring guitarist and future-Filter leader Richard Patrick. Around the same time, Reznor collaborated with his heroes in Ministry where he did remixes for the band along with participating in Ministry leader Al Jourgensen’s side-projects the Revolting C*cks and 1000 Homo DJs. Around that same time, NIN released another single from the Pretty Hate Machine album, which is the industrial-dance track of Sin.
The single for Sin is pretty much a four-track single with three remixes of the song including a cover of the Queen song Get Down Make Love from their 1977 album News of the World. Sin, which is a brilliant industrial-dance track with pulsating synthesizer and drum rhythms along with Reznor’s S&M-like lyrics is widely considered as one of the best NIN singles in their discography of singles, albums, and EPs. Though the entire CD stands at around at nearly twenty-minutes, it’s one of the more enjoyable and brilliant NIN singles around. With the Sin remixes done by the production duo of Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc along with the Queen cover produced by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker (both are known as the production team of Hypo Luxa). It’s a fun and dirty single from Reznor’s sinful mind.
The first Sin remix is a long almost-six minute version that features a longer intro of pulsating dance beats along with rhythmic synthesizers and drum tracks to accompany the original song’s mix of rhythmic synthesizers and industrial-hitting drum tracks and Reznor’s S&M filled lyrics of pain and sin like “You give me the anger/You give me the nerve/Carry out the sentence/I get what I deserve/I’m just an effigy to be defaced/To be disgraced/Your need for me has been replaced/And if I can’t everything/Well then just give me your taste” that are sexually-provocative and dark that makes the song of the dirtiest and sexual-filled NIN songs along with Closer from 1994’s The Downward Spiral. The long version also features extended synthesizer and drum tracks along with a louder guitar mix at the near end of the song.
The next mix is a dub mix that is mainly a five-minute instrumental track that is largely dominated by its pulsating and rhythmic drum and synthesizer tracks for the next few minutes along with its speedy-guitar tracks and industrial-drum hits that echoes along with repeated distorted background vocals of the word “sin” and “lies” that are then surrounded by its clashing sounds of synthesizers, guitars, and drum machine tracks throughout the rest of the track. The fourth track of the single is a shorter remix of the Sin song which stands at four-minutes features a shorter intro of rhythmic synthesizers and drum machine tracks along with a shorter synthesizer solo in the middle of the track along with its industrial-drum tracks and guitar assaults.
The real highlight of this single is the cover of the Queen song Get Down Make Love that is filled with brooding synthesizer tracks and samples of a man talking along with of men and women moaning sexually while soft and pulsating drum machine tracks along with distorted guitar rhythms as Reznor sings Freddie Mercury’s sexual-filled lyrics of “Get down, make love/(repeated two more times)/You take my body/I give you heat/You say you hungry/I give you meat/I suck your mind/You blow my head/Make love inside your head/Everybody/Get down make love/(repeat line for three more times” and then the song goes into a powerful and hard-driven rock song with its loud drum tracks and charging metal-guitar riffs as Reznor sings “Every time I got hot, you wanna cool down/Every time I get high, you wanna go down/You say it’s enough, in fact it’s too much/Every time I wanna get down, get down, make love”.
The song softens up again as Reznor sings more dirty lyrics of “I can squeeze, you can shake me/I can feel, when you break me/Come on so heavy-then you take me/You make love, you make love, you make love, you make love, You can make everybody” which is then followed Reznor by singing the lines of “Get down make love” and its powerful chorus as the song becomes heavy and angry as Reznor sings the chorus again where it ends with distorted samples including vocals by Freddie Mercury and ends with a famous guitar riff of We Will Rock You by Queen guitarist Brian May.
While the song was sexually driven, the video for Sin was the most controversial video from the Pretty Hate Machine album due to its images of genital piercings, homosexual references, topless women including one who was putting Trent in one of those old spinning things where you go upside-down or rolling in the side, and blood-smearing on a man’s chest. The video was so controversial that MTV to this day wouldn’t show it and it’s currently available on the Closure home video even though it wasn’t the whole video. The entire video is available on the Internet through NIN links and you’ll see the video in its entirety. For those who can’t handle the images I just mentioned, don’t watch it all.
Shortly after the release of the Sin single where Trent was collaborating with Ministry, Reznor and his NIN cohort Chris Vrenna also collaborated with former Public Image Limited drummer Martin Atkins for his new project Pigface where the two toured briefly with the group while Reznor co-wrote Suck with Atkins for Pigface’s Gub album and the song would appear again in the Broken EP in 1992. While Reznor was enjoying those collaborations, trouble came ahead with TVT as they gave trouble to Wax Trax label over Reznor’s collaborations with Jourgensen’s side-project for the song Supernaut by Black Sabbath and Jourgensen was forced to remix Reznor’s vocals so it would be unrecognizable to the label. Later in early 1991, Reznor learned that he wasn’t getting any credit for remixes he did for Megadeth, the Butthole Surfers, Curve, and KMFDM. There is where the war with the TVT label begins and it would go throughout during NIN’s slot at the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991 along with a brief opening stint for Guns N’ Roses in the fall of '91 all the way to 1992.
The single for Sin is one of the best and more brilliant singles NIN has put out throughout their entire career. Even though it’s short and has four tracks, it’s still enjoyable and a fun record to listen to. There’s another version of the single where the cover of the single is black instead of red that is on the U.S. single. The black cover version of Sin was released in mid-1993 where it contained the four tracks from the Sin single along with the Fixed remix EP. The black Sin is a very hard record to find and it’s something that hardcore fans will enjoy. In the end, Sin is a brilliant single for NIN fans to enjoy especially the cover of Queen’s Get Down Make Love.
Live Shows: (NIN/Bauhaus/TV on the Radio-6/7/06 Atlanta, GA Hi-Fi Buys Amphitheater) - (NIN/Deerhunter-8/13/08 Duluth, GA Gwinnett Arena) - (NIN/Jane's Addiction/Street Sweeper Social Club-5/10/09 Atlanta, GA Hi-Fi Buys Amphitheater)
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