Reznor and Malm: It'll End in Tears

Speaking of self-lasceration, this guy has been writing about it for 15 years, and it couldn't have been much more explicit than in "Hurt":

I wear my crown of shit
On my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stain of time
The feeling disappears
You are someone else
I am still right here
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

So, anyone linked as closely as management surely can't be surprised by acts of professional self-destruction on the part of Mr. Reznor:

Trent Reznor's former manager John Malm has hit out at the Nine Inch Nails frontman over that previously reported lawsuit in which Reznor accused Malm of fraud and mismanagement.
Commenting on the multi-million pound lawsuit, Malm said on Friday: "Trent Reznor's complete lack of loyalty and integrity is astounding. After 20 years of my professional and personal friendship and support, through some of his darkest hours and at great expense to me, he has decided that everyone in the world is to blame for his problems except himself. It's time for him to take some responsibility for his actions."

Malm's attorney Alan Hirth added: "Trent Reznor's lawsuit is nothing more than an ill-conceived response to an earlier lawsuit that John Malm was forced to bring in April against Reznor to recover more than $2 million in commissions that Reznor has refused to pay. Reznor has reneged on every single contract that he and Malm ever entered into.

Trent and Co. probably peaked out culturally at Woodstock '94, where his nihilism found perfect expression in a frenzied scrum of metallic mud and blood and he has been at a loss to reproduce that degree of connectivity ever since.

Regarding John Malm, fairly or not, this is what happens to enablers. Check out my interview with Malm from 1993 - is this a classic enabler or what?

Industrial music popped out the other side of the youth culture when the angriest rap of Public Enemy, Ice T, and NWA rammed into it. Gangster rap vividly chronicles the individual horrors of the streets outside the thrice-bolted doors; while industrial portrays the collective horrors made possible by technology and mass-movements. The cold, still center at the heart of most industrial is the desire to not only make music with machines, but to make music as by machines. That is why Nine Inch Nails has transcended the industrial category and become something else entirely.
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Article Author: Eric Olsen

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