Ben Myers reminded me of an essay I wrote a few years ago entitled "Transgressing Boundaries in the Nine Inch Nails: The Grotesque as a Means to the Sacred".
The thesis is this:
"The grotesque aesthetic and explicitly religious quoting of the Nine Inch Nails provides a clear medium through which the tentative structure of boundaries is expressed creating creative space for the mystery of the sacred to emerge."
Hardly a very apt picture of worship for most of us. But part of what such boundary transgression does is tear down one's assumptions of truth and purity, and causes one to view their own state of being as something fragile and tentative. By tearing down, the sacred can re-build. More that that, even without the presence of the grotesque, it is the presence of the sacred that enacts a sort of creative destruction which leads even Paul to say "For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,* who loved me and gave himself for me."
It is the same message in the Pilgrim's Progress where it is only through the Slough of Despair that we find redemption. The image of God purifying God's people through suffering is about as powerful an image in the Scriptures as we can find. The climax of the image is found in Christ crucified and risen to take away the sins of the world. The true paradox of the sacred and the grotesque that finds it intersection in the death and resurrection of the Savior.
Nine Inch Nails' 1999 double CD release The Fragile is a continuation of sorts from the previous album The Downward Spiral. A consistent theme for Trent Reznor (who for all intents and purposes is Nine Inch Nails) is understanding the shackles of inherent human limitations and then finding redemption that one makes for one's self in the midst of that situation. Thus, The Fragile begins with the song "Somewhat Damaged" with this lyric:
So impressed with all you do
Tried so hard to be like you
Flew too high and burnt the wing
Lost my faith in everything
Lick around divine debris
Taste the wealth of hate in me
Shedding skin succumb defeat
This machine is obsolete
made the choice to go away
Drink the fountain of decay
Tear a hole exquisite red
F**k the rest and stab it dead
Broken bruised forgotten sore
Too f**ked up to care anymore
Poisoned to my rotten core
Too f**ked up to care anymore
The length of the album stays in this Slough with a sublime a deep rage burning under a compressed sense of repressed self-loathing. It is, in this respect the sense of Despair and Anxiety that Kierkegaard tells us is a self that relates itself to itself. It is a profound misrelation of idolatry – of yearning for the Other in a profoundly misguided way that finds its object of desire in the seduction of the material.
Most of the album reveals the condition of humanity in the various angles of this sense of despair and loneliness when idols ultimately fail and reveal humanity's own fragility in the midst of human life. But as with The Downward Spiral Reznor gives a glimpse of redemption in the closing lyric from the song "Underneath It All":
all i do
i can still feel you
numb all through
i can still feel you
hear your call
underneath it all
kill my brain
yet you still remain
crucified
after all i've died
after all i've tried
you are still inside
all i do
i can still feel you
you remain
i am stained
Which seems like a reflection on Kierkegaard's own source of redemption in true self-relatedness again from The Sickness Unto Death:
"The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it."
Until we find our source in that which is sacred, the grotesque will lead to idolatry even as it opens the space for the sacred to inhabit our fragile sense of self so readily susceptible to despair.
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