mortice's writeup is dead on, one-hundred percent, incredibly good
and I should probably leave this node alone. but that said, since
i've never been one for wisdom, sense or reason, here are a few
tidbits and takes. ^_^
Interpretation
The Downward Spiral has a couple themes that recur and thread through the songs.
One theme is sex. (5, 8, 9,12)
Another theme is God. (2, 3, 5, 6)
Another is self destruction. (1, 6, 7, 14)
Self-hatred and depression manifest as a driving, insidious urge to act out in
self-destructive ways
("it won't give up, it wants me dead, and goddamn this noise inside my head" - the becoming)
that alternates with a desperate need to find a way to hold together in a disintegrating world,
("annie, hold a little tighter / I might just slip away" - the becoming)
the album describes a person trying to cling to sanity by escapes - through
sex,
("you can have my isolation, you can have the hate that it brings ... you make me perfect, help me become somebody else" - closer)
and through
drugs,
("the needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting" - hurt)
but like any escape, these provide only short relief, and the self is carried farther adrift.
("the me that you know is now made up of wires / and even when i'm right with you, i'm so far away" - the
becoming)
Faith in
God has been destroyed over the course of a perceived "a lifetime of fucking things up"
("god is dead / and no one cares / if there is a hell / i'll see you there" - heresy)
so there's no escape there, and the individual dives with renewed desperation into the
abyss of escape once again
("need to contaminate to alleviate this loneliness" - reptile)
never quite seeing their fall as low enough to justify pulling the trigger.
(if you're thinking about it, don't. just don't.)
Only one song is directly about suicide1: #13
With an album so carefully conceived, is
it possible that that number, with all
its weighty christian baggage,
is a coincidence? *shrug*
Oh, hey, this lyric shows up a lot:
"nothing can stop me now"2
despair, detachment, disassociation
piggy
("hey pig / nothing's turning out the way i planned")
nothing can stop me now cause i don't care anymore
nothing left to hold on to
ruiner
("and maybe that fucked me up much more than you'll ever know")
you didn't hurt me, nothing can hurt me
you didn't hurt me, nothing can stop me now
out of control
big man with a gun
("i can reduce you if i want / i have the power")
me and my fucking gun
nothing can stop me now
1. my personal opinion is that the suicide described in the title track isn't carried through, at least in the "story"
of the album - otherwise, who would narrate hurt? besides, like any good spiral (or pattern of self-degradation and
escapism), it just goes in and down, in and down, if you can't trace it, you need a smaller pen
2. after writing this section, I found out that it's been noded in a similar way by uberfetus... and it might well be a better evaluation of the theme than mine. dammit ,-) Seriously tho, I recommend any of his writeups on this subject, from what I've seen.
random trivia about the album
Chris Heath, 1995, Details Magazine:
"Trent and Tori had become friends (he sang on her last album) and she would visit him at the Los
Angeles house where The Downward Spiral was recorded. The house where Manson followers killed Sharon
Tate. On one visit, Tori told a depressed Trent that she would whip him up a hearty homecooked meal. The cursed chicken.
After six hours in the Tate house oven, it was still bloody and raw. Tori's preferred excuse: 'The spirits of the house
wouldn't let it.' Eventually Trent left for another studio, where he ordered in. And the chicken? He shrugs. 'I didn't ask.
The ghost ate it.'"
(...and now you know. The aforementioned singing on Tori's album refers, I believe, to the
backup vocals on
Past The
Mission.)
Also from the same interview:
The second Nine Inch Nails record, the "Broken" mini album, was a nasty mixed-up splurge of unfocused hate and despair. Trent
wanted his next record to be something more. He had discovered that the more he wrote about his depressions, the more it fed
and encouraged them. "And," he tells me, "I'm wondering if all this negative energy is leading to a dead end. What is the
ultimate solution to this? It's kill myself, I guess. Right?"
Maybe. But instead of doing it, he decided to chronicle the descent. It was to be a concept album called "The Downward
Spiral." If there was a template in his head, it was the album which touched him most when he was youger: Pink Floyd's
"The Wall". "The Downward Spiral," he says, "is about somebody discarding parts of themselves" -religion, love, caring
about the opinion of others -"ultimately for self-realization." The bleakness builds to a crescendo with the title track.
He simply set to music a suicide description which he wrote down when he was "really fucking utterly
superdepressed" and then forgot about. "He couldn't believe how easy it was. He put the gun into his face. Bang! So much
blood for such a tiny little hole. Problems have solutions. A lifetime of fucking things up fixed in one determined
flash."
"I'm not saying this from a covering-my-ass point of view," he insists, "but I'd thought about it several times, and saying it almost demystifites it." He was not without secondhand experience. A friend had watched his girlfriend shoot herself. And then drummer Jeff Ward - who had taken over for the the Lollapalooza era, when Trent fell out with Chris - carbon-monoxided himself in a car because he couldn't quit heroin.