Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (18 page)

It’s no surprise that many of the bands featured at Hot Topic in the nineties were from Nine Inch Nails’ parent label, Interscope. That label, more than any other major
label of the era, saw the economic value in putting renegade sounds by challenging artists into the mainstream, beginning with its controversial distribution of Death Row Records artists Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur.
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The label then cultivated Nine Inch Nails and its Nothing Records roster as its flagship alternative-rock voice, having freed Reznor from his disastrous TVT deal with the promise of creative control and his own label for artist development. As detailed in the introduction, Interscope profited mightily from the pop-music moral panics throughout the decade, managing to be edgy in both the urban and alternative formats.

The formula for a good Interscope rock band might even have had something to do with their ability to tie in to the Hot Topic distribution share. Was the band tied to an already mature, diffused subculture like Manson and goth? Could their look be merchandised like the ska-punk threads or bindis of No Doubt? One of the reasons Hot Topic avoided grunge and more socially conscious punk was that those genres had a look one could get secondhand. Hot Topic’s symbiosis with Interscope bands went into the shop’s second decade with the skinny jeans and glam goth-punk of AFI and the fingerless glove garage of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among others. But Hot Topic is clear in keeping its demographic in place: there are few, if any, Interscope rap artists, or any other black musicians, represented on Hot Topic’s store walls.

By 1999, the alternative generation had effectively ended (the last consecutive Lollapalooza was in 1997), and a new
generation focused on rap-rock, nu-metal, and post-grunge. Hot Topic got competitors: Pacific Sunwear, Gadzooks, Buckle, Wet Seal, and even Spencer’s. In 2001, the design team JGA remodeled Hot Topic in a nightclub style with brushed steel and industrial architectural elements against glass, faux brick, and red ceilings: a mall space modeled after postindustrial reuse. Even Nails changed to a more streetwear-informed look, while the music of
The Fragile
era became less aggressive and more introspective, and the uglier emotions of NIN’s early albums eddied around with late nineties rockers like Linkin Park.

Throughout the early 2000s, a mix of nu-metal, pop-punk, and emo-punk merchandise carried the store. The rise of glam emo—with its androgynous, neo-Edwardian costuming—proved a temporary boon, as did the overwhelming popularity of Slipknot and Insane Clown Posse. But there was no hit band on the level of Nails or Manson, so Hot Topic looked to promote other pop-cultural icons. Take, for example, its 2002 SpongeBob SquarePants campaign, which a former longtime employee called the “beginning of the end” for her. In 2003, CEO Betsy McLaughlin was calling for “shirts that diss SpongeBob”
⁸³
to counter the effect.

After 15 years of unstoppable growth, Hot Topic stock nosedived in 2004, and has been shaky ever since. It traded at a high of $31 in January 2004, but by the summer of 2010, it was trading at around $5.14. Back in July 2004, the
Los Angeles Business Journal
reported that “trends toward preppy looks and bright colors, primarily pink, are hurting the company’s sales,”
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a signal that Hot Topic’s main look was waning among teens. A company built on the ethos that “black is always the new black” cannot so easily carry preppy pink, and since 2004, Hot Topic has had an identity crisis in trying to find apparel that represents the new alterna niches.
In 2008, a retail reporter wrote that “being ‘on trend,’ i.e., keeping ahead of the style curve to lure fashion-conscious shoppers, is just as important as economic climate” and that Hot Topic “is increasingly seen as decidedly off-trend.”
⁸⁵

In the meantime, Hot Topic’s success spawned an evangelical Christian mallternative, C28, which opened its first store in 2001 and now has 11 stores in California and Virginia. Selling T-shirts, music, jewelry, stickers, and other accessories in a shop that looks just like Hot Topic (and is often placed directly across from the store in malls), C28 refers to its business as mall-based evangelical outreach programs geared to teens through the social encounter provided by retail exchange.
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The company taps into the ever-expanding universe of Christian corporations that earn profits while claiming to be “not of this world.” Its shirts use the same distressed fonts, tattoo art, silk-screen motifs, and bold graphics as those at Hot Topic, and employ slogans like “Broken” (from the Book of Psalms) or “Liar” as edgy self-appraisals reclaimed from the lyrics of profaners like Nine Inch Nails.

C28 calls itself an “alternative to the mainstream mall stores,” part of the ongoing campaign by the Christian right to use the language of progressive social causes to rebrand itself. C28 sells one part of its message—hope, salvation, and belonging—as sexy, the evangelical part as character-building suffering, and its regressive politics as “rebellious” against secular mainstream values. Two striking examples of the appropriation of progressive style for conservative politics are on C28 shirts: a red tee features a Che Guevara-style silk screen of Ronald Reagan with an antiabortion slogan, while another has a cute blue monkey raging against either paternity or evolution: “I’m not your daddy.” Those who wish to open a C28 franchise must, in addition to having the
proper capital, “articulate his or her testimony profession of their faith,” which includes a clause on purity from “harassment, promiscuity, pornography, fornication, adultery, homosexuality and any other deviant behavior delineated in scripture.”
⁸⁷

In the early twenty-first century, the American mall has become not just an acknowledged retail and social center, but also a battleground of ethical consumerism. With C28’s stance so articulated, the dedication of Hot Topic to bringing progressive undergrounds into the mall mainstream becomes a more explicitly political act that it has no corporate policy to back. In this climate, the rise of the
Twilight
books and films takes on an even more insidious tone. Hot Topic CEO McLaughlin called
Twilight
a “once a decade” license deal,
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and indeed the store has shifted toward the pre-teen abstinence-only eroticism that
Twilight
presents, while only three years ago it prominently displayed “Rainbows Are Gay” T-shirts and lauded the gender-fucking emo scene as its own. But emo didn’t hit, and it didn’t last. If Hot Topic is only reflecting youth culture, then the twenty-first century rock-based entertainment industry has failed to produce a compelling star with an independent, counterculturally minded message on the level of Nine Inch Nails who can put forth skepticism in the mall marketplace, which is more than a problem for music. It’s a problem for American progressive culture.

The long pause between Nine Inch Nails’
The Fragile
(1999) and
With Teeth
(2005) saw not just a change in mall-based
retail but in the entire nature of music sales and distribution. In that space Reznor got sober and won a lawsuit against his longtime manager John Malm Jr., thus ending their relationship and signaling Reznor’s renewed interest in the band as a business entity. He began to control the art and economy of Nine Inch Nails with a new intensity, first by connecting the physical CD sales and ticketing back to the well-run and vibrant nin.com website, and then by releasing the tracks to “The Hand That Feeds” and “Only” for open remix. He became more actively engaged in his own marketing and obsessed with the two-way communication possibilities of the so-called “Web 2.0” moment. A flurry of communications began, and the man behind the mass media was exposed: a newly beefy obsessive worker, online video poster, and intermittent Twitterer. In his chatter, he seemed to be more and more like his fans, only super-rich and internationally famous. Some were saddened by this mundane intimacy, but many were thrilled.

In the wake of the government failure that led to the flooding of his post-Cleveland home of New Orleans, Reznor turned his rage from the personal to the political for
Year Zero
(2007), an album he wrote on his laptop while touring.
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With it, the entire tone of Nine Inch Nails shifted.
Year Zero
was his last Interscope album, and the label partnered with Hot Topic to market the release with a national listening party, an online and in-store presale, three exclusive designs of Nine Inch Nails T-shirts, and the “Featured Artist” spot on Hot Topic’s web page. At a listening party in a Glendale, California, mall, no one came.

Perhaps the “real” fans of Nine Inch Nails in Los Angeles were not at Hot Topic because they were chasing down clues for the band’s prerelease game. Trent got Interscope to hire Web marketers 42 Entertainment to create “Year Zero,”
an alternate-reality game with a dystopian-future theme, in which clues were leaked via various media platforms and tracked by fans on the amazingly well-networked web pages of the ninternet. At the same time as the Hot Topic listening party, a van pulled up at a designated billboard on Melrose Avenue, dumped out Nine Inch Nails “resistance propaganda,” including stickers, buttons, and cell phones to use for future clues, then drove away. No money exchanged hands and no music was heard. It was just another strange moment in the ever-unfolding story of the game. “Year Zero” worked because the band’s fans are rabid and obsessive, and will follow the band regardless of their place in the market, even though the fans mostly found them through the market. The alternate reality—a band as the locus for an aesthetic, ethical, playful world—has become real through the ongoing work of fans, the label, the media, and Trent.

The reality of Hot Topic is that it is a brick-and-mortar rock-music merchandiser facing an increasingly non-brick-and-mortar retail and non-rock era. Its core demographic, those non-driving teens, are being banned from the mall and increasingly finding their own musical and cultural identities online, without as much corporate-controlled mediation. So Hot Topic, like an aging rock band, has a few options: it can serve the dinosaurs by selling nineties acts and novelties, or it can go extinct. The third option is one that NIN has taken: shed the bulk and focus on new, innovative elements of the underground culture. This means ending sentimentality and risking the brand.

Ghosts I-IV
(2008) was, after 20 years of work under the Nine Inch Nails name, the first album in which the politics of creation, production, and distribution were as much in the foreground as the music: the first NIN artifact to fit to the eighties standards for underground industrial music.
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The album was independently released by the band on their label The Null Corporation, and was licensed for noncommercial sharing and remixing through Creative Commons. As a 36-track improvisational, ambient, instrumental album,
Ghosts
was the kind of thing a major label would have
really
called an abortion if they’d been asked. Nine Inch Nails had always asserted that the physical object of music delivery ought to be art, so with the
Ghosts
paradigm, Reznor made both cheaper, easily accessible copies and more luxurious, limited-edition packages. In this way, NIN’s music became both a mass product and an art multiple. Reznor offered free downloads of nine tracks, $5 full downloads, $10 CDs, a $75 deluxe edition, and a $300 ultra-deluxe edition. He sold $1.6 million worth in the first week.
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The album hit the top of
Billboard
’s Dance/Electronic chart, ranked third on Alternative Albums, and reached No. 14 on the
Billboard
200.

With
Ghosts
, Reznor’s image was remade. In the nineties, he was portrayed as a gothic bad boy, a brat who was pissed about never getting as much cred as Kurt and who picked fights with rival rockers, and an anti-Christian folk devil. In the second half of the 2000s, he became a symbol of resistance to the corporate music industry, an icon helping to dismantle the very structures that made him, through his use of everyday digital technologies. He became what he always was to his fans: an antihero of postindustrial popular music.

Hot Topic’s partner MP3 store, ShockHound, was introduced in the fall of 2008. It may have the same edgy, alt-rock design that carries the Hot Topic brand, but the e-shop stocks genres way outside the brand’s aesthetic. Like its competitors iTunes and Napster, ShockHound is a generic online big box that carries everything it can license. This could mean either that young people are more versatile listeners given the limitless online access or that stocking all subgenres costs
nearly nothing in City of Industry hard drives and that the company can take a buck from a Fat Joe fan online just as easily as a 3Oh!3 fan. But it begs the question: Why would any teen, given all the options of online music shopping, use Hot Topic to guide their purchases? Isn’t the point of the internet that it
isn’t
the mall?

In a 2008 interview in the
New York Times
, Hot Topic president Jerry Cook affirmed that merchandise sales drove the chain, but that by focusing on MP3 sales and in-store CD displays, which had always been present but nominal, the company could maintain the illusion of a music-centered business while branching out its T-shirt and poster offers beyond rock for online sales.
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CEO McLaughlin told
Billboard
in December 2008 that teens no longer perceived of their parents’ music as an affront to their own musical tastes, nor were their tastes as narrow-minded as being limited to the “rock” umbrella, so there was no reason that rebellion needed to be encoded in the online shop.
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Hot Topic has recently posted double-digit sales increases of CDs, as traditional brick-and-mortar record stores close. Soon Hot Topic may be one of the only places to buy music in suburbia, and as it expands online, it no longer signifies the slightest generational, musical, or social alternative, but rather becomes the last-standing record store: mainstream by default.