Originally Posted by
ImTheWiseJanitor
I’m loving reading all these inputs about the record, as I do every album cycle. All I can say is that while there’s great satisfaction to be drawn from stories that are tied up neatly, with a bow to cap it all off, I always find that I personally get more immersed in stories that are incomplete - whether it be by design or a result of circumstance that makes it so. Something Trent said about the Year Zero ARG, which was my introduction to ETS and all you lovey folks, deeply resonated with me. I’m paraphrasing because I’m lazy, but it was something along the lines of, “I’m giving you chapters 1, 2, 5, 20, and 76.” That concept kind of fascinated me, because I guess until I was 17 (fuck, I’ve been here 11 YEARS?), I hadn’t really even tried to look at stories or art as something that can be incomplete and still be beautiful and creative.
That’s one thing that I love about the NIN discography - Nothing feels truly complete, and it all pulls on those itty bitty threads that connect from one work to another, which keeps me listening, investigating, and posturing new ideas about all of it until...well, I guess until I just don’t have the mental capacity to do that anymore. Until that moment, the possibilities are infinite. Bad Witch just pulls on some of the same strings as nearly any release in the catalog - There’s never enough time. Questions and hypotheses on the idea of God. The idea that no matter what we do, as a species or individuals, some things will simply never change, but maybe someday, they could. Determining how much of “you” is actually “you” versus other influences, be that your past life, dependence on another person, people, drugs, ideology, or any other thing that can consume a person’s soul. Asking ourselves what COULD have been.
I suppose my point is that over time, I’m wondering whether a perfectly articulated and thought-out narrative even fits in with the world that Nine Inch Nails creates for itself. I don’t think this trilogy is a perfect representation of what it was idealized to be in the beginning stages of its creation, and Bad Witch is a natural mutation in that 3-link chain that almost seems to want to separate itself from the other two releases, to a degree. It’s absolutely connected. But I think it’s connected in more of a mutative, evolutionary sense than a cohesive narrative sense. If you were to map out each of the three releases and connect them with red string, you’d have a myriad of connections between them, but you’d also likely be left with dozens of open ends. Maybe a bunch of those open ends stretch waaay back to other works if you go far enough, but maybe it’s less of a direct connection to something that can be pinpointed and more of a natural tendency toward a given direction. Like something’s there, but can’t quite be defined or made out clearly - ANOTHER common trope we’ve all seen in NIN’s work over the years.
There are always going to be connections to the past, connections to the future that we may not be aware of when living in the present, and connections that may not even be meant go anywhere, but keep us intrigued all the same. Perhaps meant to be explored without a definitive end. The artwork, the physical components, the videos - while they may not bring all the concrete answers we want, they can be tools to help us in the search that some of us just can’t seem to stop ourselves from undertaking, whether it leads to something created more from our own imaginations and perceptions, or something intentionally left for us to eventually find in the background.
Anyway, I’m done taking a shit, back to work!