Photo: Kevin Cummins
By the time 1994 rolled around, the Beastie Boys had already cycled through several creative personas: the frat rap of Licenced to Ill, the sample-heavy creative breakthrough Paul’s Boutique, and Check Your Head, which saw them picking up instruments to make the kind of hardcore tracks they had in the ‘80s, and create a series of loungey instrumentals.
On Ill Communication, they compartmentalised those various modes, then explored within them, piling live instruments on top of samples, and rapping through cheap plastic mics that naturally distorted.
When they rapped they were lyrically adventurous, knowing when to lock into a hook, and when to let fly, celebrating snowboarding, atoning for sexist lyrics from their past, and embracing environmentalism and buddhism.
Two totemic hip-hop debuts came out in 1994: Nas’ debut Illmatic, and Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die. Beastie Boys were doing something else entirely, and while they usually kept rap, lounge, and hardcore separate, they combined them all on ‘Sabotage’, which to this day is one of a kind.
Another act mixing different modes of music-making, but coming from a much more angst-ridden place, Trent Reznor released his second full-length album as Nine Inch Nails in 1994.
Reznor had begun playing piano at a young age, then studied computer engineering, and both those skill sets found a home in NiN, who helped popularise industrial music.
The Downward Spiral found him throwing everything at the wall, sampling sounds from movies like George Lucas’s THX 1138, getting King Crimson’s Adrian Belew to play freestyle guitar, sampling individual hits from various drummers, and manipulating his voice beyond recognition.
It’s an intentional abrasive album, and often deeply unnerving, as it charts its protagonist’s journey toward suicide, targetting organised religion, gun ownership, and sexual fixation along the way.
But its main strength, in hindsight, and the thing that serves Reznor so well in his new career as film composer, are the delicate melodies that keep appearing, sometimes as recurring motifs throughout the album.
Its final song, ‘Hurt’ would take on a new life when it was covered by Johnny Cash, but The Downward Spiral’s most lingering moment might be ‘Closer’, an extremely X-rated song about someone using sex to get them ‘closer to god’.
Reznor’s lyrics would become his weak point, but on this album they’re often profound as well as profane, and full of strange, specific details.
‘Closer’ sampled the kick drum from Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’, and builds to a rousing end, after Reznor’s character tells the object of his desire she’s the reason he stays alive. It’s an ecstatic collision of multiple melodies, and multiple rhythms, disturbing in a way that lingers.
Some of the anarchic spirit of Nine Inch Nails could be found in Liam Howlett’s Prodigy, whose second album Music For the Jilted Generation also came out in 1994.
As the title suggests, it tapped into some of the anti-establishment sentiment that was in the air at that time, and fused it to a tough version of rave music.
Their commercial breakthrough came three years later, with the world beating Fat of the Land, but the fusion of styles was already germinating here.
