When I was young and yearning to see what lay beyond the suburbs of the Midwest, Trent Reznor was like my patron saint. A lot of people don't realize that the leader of industrial rock behemoth Nine Inch Nails spent his adolescence in rural western Pennsylvania and really came into his own as an artist in the desolate wasteland that was northeastern Ohio in the late 80s. The fact that he was able to use everything that makes the Midwest a kind of stifling place and channeled that back into his art was incredibly inspiring to me growing up. He used Cleveland as an incubator to hone and perfect his sound, which fused pop-sensibilities with aggressive electronic noise and raw, emotive lyrics. And similar to Devo, another forward-thinking northern Ohio band, when Nine Inch Nails finally reached the outside world, it was a fully formed musical force, replete with its own definitive sound, iconography, and aesthetic.
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Trent Reznor Talks About Making It Out of the Midwest
"There wasn't a lot of stuff going on in Cleveland. It felt like the city could grind you down. In a lot of ways that motivated me to try to get better at something, to find a way out and break through."
