Nine Inch Nails played between Ice T and Living Colour and was clearly the highlight of the show. NIN filled in the industrial music slot in the show's cafeteria format.

Industrial music was some white musician's response to the angriest rap of Public Enemy, Ice T, and NWA in the mid-80s. Gangsta rap vividly chronicled the individual horrors of the streets while industrial portrayed the collective horrors made possible by technology and mass-movements. The cold center at the heart of most industrial is the desire to not only make music with machines, but to make music as BY machines. Nine Inch Nails had transcended the industrial category and become something else entirely, even then.

While the industrialists sought to escape their own organic natures through immersion in technology, Trent Reznor (singer, writer, multi-instrumentalist, producer of NIN) expressed his organic nature THROUGH technology. Reznor discussed this issue with the DJ in a spring, 1991 interview.

"I had tried to write songs on and off, but I never seemed to be able to get it together. It didn't feel right. I had kept a journal of my most private and personal feelings, and I had no intention of ever showing it to anyone else, let alone publishing it.

"In a sickening flash one night, I realized that I had to write songs from my journal. This scared the hell out of me, but I knew it was real, and that is what my songs were missing: emotional reality. I felt naked and embarrassed, but when I felt like giving in, I thought about my favorite albums, and they were the ones that were the most emotionally revealing."

Art is turning personal feelings into something tangible through the use of technique. Everyone has the feelings, many have the technique, but few have the courage and the will to turn the feelings into public commodities and the technique to pull it off. After playing in several local bands through the mid-80s, including Exotic Birds, Reznor went solo, naming his solo project Nine Inch Nails.

"Head Like a Hole" was Reznor's first hit from NIN's first album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989). It is still his most memorable song. "Head" opens with a pumping, haunted house keyboard bass line vaguely reminiscent of Ministry's "Everyday (Is Like Halloween)."

Reznor's vocals ease in, "God money I'll do anything for you." The voice seems to be struggling quietly for air. Menace is implied in the quiet as well as the funhouse bass line. The god Money is voracious, "God money don't want everything, he wants it all."

Reznor's vocals build toward the chorus. As the chorus erupts, the vocals veer from breathless insinuation to full-blown distorted industrial terror: "Head like a hole, black as your soul, I'd rather die than give you control."