Nine Inch Nails at Lollapalooza and the march of the ageless.

A photo I took of Nine Inch Nails in 2008

I was trying to figure out just why so many teenagers and twenty-somethings approached the Nine Inch Nails set at Lollapalooza with such fervor. Surely the band had been famous long enough to have been leached of an actual emotional resonance with kids who only knew Trent Reznor's sound as pop music and not that of a tortured outsider screaming outside of the mainstream walls.* How could this possibly mean something to this new generation?

Then I thought about the fact that Pretty Hate Machine is two decades old and what kind of music did I listen to as a teenager looking to unleash my own feelings of alienation? Who were my primary go-to bands? David Bowie, Pink Floyd and The Who; all three of those bands helped me survive the terrible teens. And yes, I liked contemporary acts (especially when I discovered a little band named Jane's Addiction who had just released their debut and sounded like everything I had in my head and didn't know it) but the ones that stuck around the longest were all, yup, two decades plus into their (mostly over at that time) careers.** Which basically means it's time for me to face the inevitable, and that is that most of the bands I count as contemporaries as far as my teenage years and early twenties are now, irrefutably, classic rock.

You would think that makes me feel old, but it actually fills me with genuine happiness. You see, it proves that good music is truly timeless and can elicit fresh emotions from a brand new audience long after its creation. And that's what I saw happening during the Nine Inch Nails set at Lollapalooza.

Long live rock.

* I could, and may, do a whole piece on just how revolutionary Nine Inch Nails was when they came onto the scene. The Industrial genre was fully formed, but something about Reznor's ability to take savagery and machines and add funk and melody set him apart from everyone. It's not an exaggeration to say his was a visionary voice in its ability to synthesize all his various influences—internal and external—and create bona fide pop songs that sounded like nothing else out there at the time. of course this aside basically answers my primary question in the piece above at a more basic level than my 35,000 foot observation.

** The Who hadn't reunited after the unfortunate Kenney Jones phase of their career. Pink Floyd was in the midst of a million internal lawsuits. David Bowie was on licking his sounds and had turned to Tin Machine in the aftermath of his Glass Spider fiasco. So what I'm saying is that aside from Bowie—and I am one of the few that genuinely loved Tin Machine—none of my holy trio were particularly timely.