Merzbau wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-04-18-nine-inch-nails_N.htm
IM IN IT HEY COOL SO IS LEVIATHANT
IM IN IT HEY COOL SO IS LEVIATHANT
Very well written article. Montgomery predicts opening sales of 300,000? He's so optimistic, I hope he's right. Still a great article.
Review from the Cleveland Free Times (free weekly magazine)
2.5/4 stars
Fear and Self-Loathing: NIN's dystopic Year Zero isn't entirely effective
by Anastasia Pantsios
------------
Starting with Pretty Hate Machine in 1989, Trent Reznor, AKA Nine Inch Nails, has used his music to explore his inner dystopia, a world of self-loathing, addiction, disgust, and soul-sickness. Now, with Year Zero, only his fifth full-length studio album in 20 years, he's expanded the vision to an outer dystopia, scavenging bits of such dystopian classics as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and even the Who's Tommy, to piece together a 16-track song cycle about an increasingly totalitarian society counting down to some sort of vaguely defined fate (Nuclear holocaust? Complete mind control? It's hard to tell) in 2022 - the "year zero" of the title.
Dedicated Fans will likely have fun deciphering all this, as they did the pre-release puzzles the band planted on a network of web sites, amond other places. Others might find the elements of the story - controlling populaces through mind altering drugs and religion, the lone resistant vigilante, thought police, etc. - somewhat secondhand. And truthfully, the story doesn't seem to move forward so much as run in place, saying the same things over and over again.
As for the music, Reznor has reached back to his seminal debut, focusing more on tight song structures, a trend he began with 2005's With Teeth, following the amorphous, ambient soundscapes of 1999's The Fragile. That's for the best, especially since he's worked in some ambient-style sections for contrast in tunes like "The Greater Good" and "In This Twilight" where they set moods without taking over the track. The downside is that he's recycling the sounds that he helped put on the pop-music charts, such as those raspy metallic synths which keep jumping in to spur tunes forward but now sound very early '90s.
In places - "Meet Your Master" for instance - he seems to be deliberately evoking his past, obliquely referencing his best known tune, "Head Like A Hole," in both the opening line "bow down in position" and certain melodic phrases. "God Given," with its praiseful chorus that opens "and he gives us sight/and we see the light/and it burns so bright/now we know we're right," seems to be deliberately echoing "We're Not Gonna Take It" from Tommy - if only it were as catchy as "Listening to you i get the music/gazing at you I get the heat..."
Ultimately if Year Zero has a problem, that's it. No one expects Reznor to be an original dystopian conceptualist - visions of how society goes bad tend to be similar - but a listener will long for an occasional chorus that's mind-controlling irresistible, driven by a martial beat with the hypnotic drive of a Nazi rally. The music mostly fails to reinforce the album's theme of outside forces trying to shape and control peoples' minds and behavior, and that's something that the best pop music is known for. Reznor needed to have written a couple of "can't get it out of your head" tunes, the kind people chant on a dance floor or sing along with at a concert like the robotic zombies Year Zero proposes its citizens turn into, for it to be entirely effective.
i think the review isnt very accurate, but atleast the score wasnt so terrible, and now my fingers hurt
2.5/4 stars
Fear and Self-Loathing: NIN's dystopic Year Zero isn't entirely effective
by Anastasia Pantsios
------------
Starting with Pretty Hate Machine in 1989, Trent Reznor, AKA Nine Inch Nails, has used his music to explore his inner dystopia, a world of self-loathing, addiction, disgust, and soul-sickness. Now, with Year Zero, only his fifth full-length studio album in 20 years, he's expanded the vision to an outer dystopia, scavenging bits of such dystopian classics as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and even the Who's Tommy, to piece together a 16-track song cycle about an increasingly totalitarian society counting down to some sort of vaguely defined fate (Nuclear holocaust? Complete mind control? It's hard to tell) in 2022 - the "year zero" of the title.
Dedicated Fans will likely have fun deciphering all this, as they did the pre-release puzzles the band planted on a network of web sites, amond other places. Others might find the elements of the story - controlling populaces through mind altering drugs and religion, the lone resistant vigilante, thought police, etc. - somewhat secondhand. And truthfully, the story doesn't seem to move forward so much as run in place, saying the same things over and over again.
As for the music, Reznor has reached back to his seminal debut, focusing more on tight song structures, a trend he began with 2005's With Teeth, following the amorphous, ambient soundscapes of 1999's The Fragile. That's for the best, especially since he's worked in some ambient-style sections for contrast in tunes like "The Greater Good" and "In This Twilight" where they set moods without taking over the track. The downside is that he's recycling the sounds that he helped put on the pop-music charts, such as those raspy metallic synths which keep jumping in to spur tunes forward but now sound very early '90s.
In places - "Meet Your Master" for instance - he seems to be deliberately evoking his past, obliquely referencing his best known tune, "Head Like A Hole," in both the opening line "bow down in position" and certain melodic phrases. "God Given," with its praiseful chorus that opens "and he gives us sight/and we see the light/and it burns so bright/now we know we're right," seems to be deliberately echoing "We're Not Gonna Take It" from Tommy - if only it were as catchy as "Listening to you i get the music/gazing at you I get the heat..."
Ultimately if Year Zero has a problem, that's it. No one expects Reznor to be an original dystopian conceptualist - visions of how society goes bad tend to be similar - but a listener will long for an occasional chorus that's mind-controlling irresistible, driven by a martial beat with the hypnotic drive of a Nazi rally. The music mostly fails to reinforce the album's theme of outside forces trying to shape and control peoples' minds and behavior, and that's something that the best pop music is known for. Reznor needed to have written a couple of "can't get it out of your head" tunes, the kind people chant on a dance floor or sing along with at a concert like the robotic zombies Year Zero proposes its citizens turn into, for it to be entirely effective.
i think the review isnt very accurate, but atleast the score wasnt so terrible, and now my fingers hurt
Batman
Do you believe in love?
The Dark Knight
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 279.847
Location: Gotham City
Do you believe in love?
The Dark Knight
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 279.847
Location: Gotham City
Leo3375 was kind enough to transcribe the Rolling Stone article that features our very own Swindley. Here it is:
Quote:
Zero’s Heroes
42 Entertainment and the mystery surrounding Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero
By David Kushner
At first it seems like any other YouTube video. Someone’s pointing the camera out a car window as a desert landscape rolls by. But then thunder crashes, and what appears to be a giant hand made of black smoke reaches down from the sky.
The only clue to the clip’s provenance is a road sign that flashes past so quickly you have to hit PAUSE to make it out: I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE. There’s no music, no credits. Nothing to indicate that it is, in fact, a teaser for Nine Inch Nails’ new album, Year Zero. The clip. And dozens of other online clues, form the latest salvo in a burgeoning new style of promo called alternate-reality gaming (ARG). Part scavenger hunt, part online game, these elaborate puzzles are created by a clandestine startup called 42 Entertainment. The goal: to blend fiction and reality in ways that engage a new generation of fans.
Just don’t call it marketing. “The term ‘marketing’ sure is a frustrating one for me,” NIN mastermind Trent Reznor recently blogged. (He and reps from 42 Entertainment declined to be interviewed.) “What you are now experiencing is ‘year zero,’” Reznor wrote. “It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record—it is the art form… and we’re just getting started.”
Based in Pasadena, California, and the Bay Area, 42 Entertainment sports an all-star team of marketing and gaming vets whose experience runs from Proctor & Gamble product launches to designing rides for Disneyland. ARG, they believe, is the next frontier—and their mind-bending online campaigns for the likes of DreamWorks, Microsoft and Disney are often more compelling than the products being pushed (see below).
“The eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old demo has grown up in a marketing-saturated environment and has developed a sophisticated set of tools for avoiding the vast majority of marketing messages,” Jordan Weisman, 42’s co-founder, has said. “As a rule of thumb, the bigger the neon sign, the faster they’ll run the other way. So the premise here is, instead of shouting, go the opposite way and whisper.”
Year Zero’s strange life started in February, when a fan noticed that his NIN concert shirt had the words I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE encoded on the back. A quick Googling revealed a Web site of the same name. The site warns of Parepin, a drug put into the water supply by the feds that may be causing you to see stuff like a giant hand descending from the sky (photos included). E-mail the Webmaster and you get an auto-response in which he inexplicably changes tune: “It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent. I’m drinking the water. So should you.”
Cryptic new Web sites keep popping up online, elaborating on the conspiracy. There are phone numbers to dial, wiretap transcripts to decipher. At NIN concerts in Portugal and England, fans found computer memory sticks in bathroom stalls containing Year Zero songs. The clues are coming at such a rate that there’s a Wikipedia entry and forums of NIN nerds teaming up to keep track.
“It engages fans to the point where they can actually feel like they are an important part of the marketing of the album,” says Mike Swindley, the twenty-four-year-old administrator of the NIN fan site Echoing the Sound. “It makes me feel like I’m fifteen again.”
For Reznor, a lifelong gamer, that’s the idea. As a kid, he drew early inspiration from video games, once going so far as to pry off the back of an Asteroids machine just to peer inside. Since then, he composed the soundtrack for the game Quake and stopped recording The Fragile to play Halo upon its release. “It put me back a few days,” he said at the time. “But what’s a few days when there’s something important to do?”
Some pioneers warn that ARG can get too geeky for its own good. “The most difficult thing is striking the balance between accessibility and making it too complicated,” says Mike Benson, executive vice president of marketing for ABC, which ran the Lost Experience online game to promote its hit show last year.
“ARG law has always been to not let anybody know you’re doing ARG,” says Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of NBC’s Heroes, which is currently developing a game. “I think that keeps a lot of people from playing. So we are actively trying to lower the barrier of entry [by] being open about what we’re doing—to get more than the usual D&D-type guy involved.”
With the Year Zero buzz growing, Reznor has proved that harnessing the power of music geeks may be victory enough.
42 Entertainment’s Greatest Hits
2001 The Beast
A murder-mystery promo for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. that fans unraveled via Web sites, e-mails and faxes, the Beast put 42—and ARG—on the map.
2004 I Love Bees
The ARG for Halo 2 grew into a radio drama that played out over pay phones across the country; participants would record the calls, then stitch them together to hear a teaser for the game.
2006 Dead Man’s Tale
The ARG for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 used Windows Live Messenger to throw players into a dialogue with the film’s Billy Bones. As you IM’d, puzzles and games were unleashed.
2007 Vanishing Point
An ad on the Internet Explorer blog led nerds on a cross-country hunt and helped promote Microsoft’s Vista OS. The clues appeared everywhere—from skywritten ads to the Bellagio fountains in Vegas.
42 Entertainment and the mystery surrounding Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero
By David Kushner
At first it seems like any other YouTube video. Someone’s pointing the camera out a car window as a desert landscape rolls by. But then thunder crashes, and what appears to be a giant hand made of black smoke reaches down from the sky.
The only clue to the clip’s provenance is a road sign that flashes past so quickly you have to hit PAUSE to make it out: I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE. There’s no music, no credits. Nothing to indicate that it is, in fact, a teaser for Nine Inch Nails’ new album, Year Zero. The clip. And dozens of other online clues, form the latest salvo in a burgeoning new style of promo called alternate-reality gaming (ARG). Part scavenger hunt, part online game, these elaborate puzzles are created by a clandestine startup called 42 Entertainment. The goal: to blend fiction and reality in ways that engage a new generation of fans.
Just don’t call it marketing. “The term ‘marketing’ sure is a frustrating one for me,” NIN mastermind Trent Reznor recently blogged. (He and reps from 42 Entertainment declined to be interviewed.) “What you are now experiencing is ‘year zero,’” Reznor wrote. “It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record—it is the art form… and we’re just getting started.”
Based in Pasadena, California, and the Bay Area, 42 Entertainment sports an all-star team of marketing and gaming vets whose experience runs from Proctor & Gamble product launches to designing rides for Disneyland. ARG, they believe, is the next frontier—and their mind-bending online campaigns for the likes of DreamWorks, Microsoft and Disney are often more compelling than the products being pushed (see below).
“The eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old demo has grown up in a marketing-saturated environment and has developed a sophisticated set of tools for avoiding the vast majority of marketing messages,” Jordan Weisman, 42’s co-founder, has said. “As a rule of thumb, the bigger the neon sign, the faster they’ll run the other way. So the premise here is, instead of shouting, go the opposite way and whisper.”
Year Zero’s strange life started in February, when a fan noticed that his NIN concert shirt had the words I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE encoded on the back. A quick Googling revealed a Web site of the same name. The site warns of Parepin, a drug put into the water supply by the feds that may be causing you to see stuff like a giant hand descending from the sky (photos included). E-mail the Webmaster and you get an auto-response in which he inexplicably changes tune: “It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent. I’m drinking the water. So should you.”
Cryptic new Web sites keep popping up online, elaborating on the conspiracy. There are phone numbers to dial, wiretap transcripts to decipher. At NIN concerts in Portugal and England, fans found computer memory sticks in bathroom stalls containing Year Zero songs. The clues are coming at such a rate that there’s a Wikipedia entry and forums of NIN nerds teaming up to keep track.
“It engages fans to the point where they can actually feel like they are an important part of the marketing of the album,” says Mike Swindley, the twenty-four-year-old administrator of the NIN fan site Echoing the Sound. “It makes me feel like I’m fifteen again.”
For Reznor, a lifelong gamer, that’s the idea. As a kid, he drew early inspiration from video games, once going so far as to pry off the back of an Asteroids machine just to peer inside. Since then, he composed the soundtrack for the game Quake and stopped recording The Fragile to play Halo upon its release. “It put me back a few days,” he said at the time. “But what’s a few days when there’s something important to do?”
Some pioneers warn that ARG can get too geeky for its own good. “The most difficult thing is striking the balance between accessibility and making it too complicated,” says Mike Benson, executive vice president of marketing for ABC, which ran the Lost Experience online game to promote its hit show last year.
“ARG law has always been to not let anybody know you’re doing ARG,” says Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of NBC’s Heroes, which is currently developing a game. “I think that keeps a lot of people from playing. So we are actively trying to lower the barrier of entry [by] being open about what we’re doing—to get more than the usual D&D-type guy involved.”
With the Year Zero buzz growing, Reznor has proved that harnessing the power of music geeks may be victory enough.
42 Entertainment’s Greatest Hits
2001 The Beast
A murder-mystery promo for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. that fans unraveled via Web sites, e-mails and faxes, the Beast put 42—and ARG—on the map.
2004 I Love Bees
The ARG for Halo 2 grew into a radio drama that played out over pay phones across the country; participants would record the calls, then stitch them together to hear a teaser for the game.
2006 Dead Man’s Tale
The ARG for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 used Windows Live Messenger to throw players into a dialogue with the film’s Billy Bones. As you IM’d, puzzles and games were unleashed.
2007 Vanishing Point
An ad on the Internet Explorer blog led nerds on a cross-country hunt and helped promote Microsoft’s Vista OS. The clues appeared everywhere—from skywritten ads to the Bellagio fountains in Vegas.
Avril Lavign is sinking on Amazon.com's top sale list, while NIN is still at #1. Reznor may be end up beating Avril after all!
the sooner avril's career fails, the sooner she'll be forced to get naked to make money. everyone wins!!!
well just something to consider, her album is getting horrible reviews, the same people who did the review i posted a lil bit ago only gave her 1/4 stars :D
Batman wrote:
Leo3375 was kind enough to transcribe the Rolling Stone article that features our very own Swindley. Here it is:
text
text
i posted a pic of this article on page 27 if you want to take a look at it..
Cellophane wrote:
copy of the article in Rolling Stone if anyone is interested:
i really thought that song girlfriend was making fun of those pop songs, but shes just riding the coat tails. Fuckin poser lol.
killj33
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
mastershake22222 wrote:
i really thought that song girlfriend was making fun of those pop songs, but shes just riding the coat tails. Fuckin poser LoLLerskates *HUGZ*.
Yeah I mean she was always a poser, but I don't know. There was something tolerable about her on her first album at least. But now... yeah what the hell?
GodofReptiles wrote:
Avril
organizm wrote:
Avril
mastershake22222 wrote:
Avril
killj33 wrote:
Avril
Curly21029 wrote:
Avril
Tool Hotline has been officially replaced...
3killa wrote:
No one expects Reznor to be an original dystopian conceptualist - visions of how society goes bad tend to be similar - but a listener will long for an occasional chorus that's mind-controlling irresistible, driven by a martial beat with the hypnotic drive of a Nazi rally. The music mostly fails to reinforce the album's theme of outside forces trying to shape and control peoples' minds and behavior, and that's something that the best pop music is known for. Reznor needed to have written a couple of "can't get it out of your head" tunes, the kind people chant on a dance floor or sing along with at a concert like the robotic zombies Year Zero proposes its citizens turn into, for it to be entirely effective.
She's seriously going to take points off for it not being the stupid pop-anthem heavy album she's longing for? Pfft...a big "fuck you" to thought provoking complexity. I hope she's enjoying her new Avril album. (sorry shagg)
Curly21029 wrote:
(sorry shagg)
lol. dont worry about it (added to the list hehe).
nvm was already posted elsewhere
jnk6980
Galactic Cowboys Never Age.
Grand Pontiff
Joined: 15 Aug 2006
Posts: 1141.99
Location: New Jersey
Galactic Cowboys Never Age.
Grand Pontiff
Joined: 15 Aug 2006
Posts: 1141.99
Location: New Jersey
On Wikipedia their saying that NIN will finish in second place. Is this accurate, when do they add up the sales? I still cant believe that it is this close between the two. People have been hyped up for NIN's album for quite some time now I figured that Avril wouldn't maintain the same fan base she once had after that whole image change and I thought the obsessive NIN fans who would buy 10 or more albums I used to think you guys were crazy (you still are lol) would blow her fans out the water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28album%29#Chart_Positions
organizm wrote:
the sooner avril's career fails, the sooner she'll be forced to get naked to make money. everyone wins!!!
here here!
jnk6980 wrote:
On Wikipedia their saying that NIN will finish in second place. Is this accurate, when do they add up the sales? I still cant believe that it is this close between the two. People have been hyped up for NIN's album for quite some time now I figured that Avril wouldn't maintain the same fan base she once had after that whole image change and I thought the obsessive NIN fans who would buy 10 or more albums I used to think you guys were crazy (you still are LoLLerskates *HUGZ*) would blow her fans out the water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28album%29#Chart_Positions
The US sales hasn't add up yet (see the blank space in " Billboard"), that is, the actual physical album sales is still up in the air.
jnk6980
Galactic Cowboys Never Age.
Grand Pontiff
Joined: 15 Aug 2006
Posts: 1141.99
Location: New Jersey
Galactic Cowboys Never Age.
Grand Pontiff
Joined: 15 Aug 2006
Posts: 1141.99
Location: New Jersey
midnight wrote:
The US sales hasn't add up yet (see the blank space in " Billboard"), that is, the actual physical album sales is still up in the air.
jnk6980 wrote:
On Wikipedia their saying that NIN will finish in second place. Is this accurate, when do they add up the sales? I still cant believe that it is this close between the two. People have been hyped up for NIN's album for quite some time now I figured that Avril wouldn't maintain the same fan base she once had after that whole image change and I thought the obsessive NIN fans who would buy 10 or more albums I used to think you guys were crazy (you still are LoLLerskates *HUGZ*) would blow her fans out the water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28album%29#Chart_Positions
The US sales hasn't add up yet (see the blank space in " Billboard"), that is, the actual physical album sales is still up in the air.
Someone edited it when I first posted that it said 2.
killj33
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
jnk6980 wrote:
Someone edited it when I first posted that it said 2.
midnight wrote:
The US sales hasn't add up yet (see the blank space in " Billboard"), that is, the actual physical album sales is still up in the air.
jnk6980 wrote:
On Wikipedia their saying that NIN will finish in second place. Is this accurate, when do they add up the sales? I still cant believe that it is this close between the two. People have been hyped up for NIN's album for quite some time now I figured that Avril wouldn't maintain the same fan base she once had after that whole image change and I thought the obsessive NIN fans who would buy 10 or more albums I used to think you guys were crazy (you still are LoLLerskates *HUGZ*) would blow her fans out the water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28album%29#Chart_Positions
The US sales hasn't add up yet (see the blank space in " Billboard"), that is, the actual physical album sales is still up in the air.
Someone edited it when I first posted that it said 2.
It's all speculation at this point, there is a site that polls sales on the first day from a bunch of different retailers. They said that avril would hit 250k and NIN would trail at 200k. Basically they are just assuming she will win.
Didn't notice it until now, appearently Year Zero is the #2 album on Rhapsody (base on play), behind Shock Value and 2 spots ahead of Lavigne. Meanwhile NIN is the #3 artist on Rhapsody, behind Lavigne and Timabaland, and NIN is #2 top artist feed at RS...
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists?pageid=rs.page.rssfeeds&pageregion=rightcolumn
Shouldn't Rolling Stone have a new issue out today?
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists?pageid=rs.page.rssfeeds&pageregion=rightcolumn
Shouldn't Rolling Stone have a new issue out today?
killj33
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
24.24.1.709 killj33 [Incarcerated]
Master of the Ninth Arch
Joined: 22 Feb 2007
Posts: 304.175
midnight wrote:
Didn't notice it until now, appearently Year Zero is the #2 album on Rhapsody (base on play), behind Shock Value and 2 spots ahead of Lavigne. Meanwhile NIN is the #3 artist on Rhapsody, behind Lavigne and Timabaland, and NIN is #2 top artist feed at RS...
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists?pageid=rs.page.rssfeeds&pageregion=rightcolumn
Shouldn't Rolling Stone have a new issue out today?
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists?pageid=rs.page.rssfeeds&pageregion=rightcolumn
Shouldn't Rolling Stone have a new issue out today?
The fact NIN is doing that well on stuff like Rhapsody is impressive, most fans don't go that route. I don't think..
EDIT: God I live in Utah and we have a complete pop station, they just played Capital-G. I'm serious I just heard Timbaland, Gwen Steffani, Avril Lavigne, and NIN in the same hour. I knew it was going to happen, but I died a little inside.