Here goes:
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
(Released 1994)
Self Pity as a Muse, Self Loathing as a Force in Music
Crazy guy
Everybody knows that Trent Reznor is one crazy guy, right? Thus it is no surprise that the Nine Inch Nails mastermind's magnum opus chronicles a perturbed man's fall from some sort of grace to the point of suicide. Conceptually, the idea was not anything particularly new... depression and death had been popular themes in music since god-knows-when, maybe beginning with Hank Williams' classic "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" or even earlier perhaps. What was so genius about this album, intentionally or otherwise, was that it was released at exactly the point when music like it could sell the most records.
In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain blew up his head with a shotgun, and a lot of depressed teenagers became a lot more depressed. However much it pains me to say this, Cobain had become some sort of unwilling poster child of "generation X", whatever that means, and his death carried a lot of weight, even more than his life did for most of those people. Well it just so happens that the very next month, Nothing Records dropped "The Downward Spiral", and hundreds of thousands of those very same people who so mourned Kurt Cobain's death rushed to buy it. It was
absolutely perfect timing. The actual quality of the album is irrelevant. It just worked that well.
And that's just pretty interesting.