In 1989, a socially anxious handyman named Trent Reznor shut himself in the Cleveland recording studio that employed him and emerged with one of rock and roll’s great statements of sexual frustration. Nine Inch Nails’s debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, blended noise with synthesized melodies and dance beats; it sounded like the work of a loner who hated his own need for connection, intimacy, and other bodies. In the ragged rasp of a man dying of thirst, Reznor screamed a confession: “I just want something I can never have!”
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic

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