Trent Reznor is the rightful successor to the great Erik Satie. Don’t let yourself ignore this plain and obvious fact because you are embarrassed of your youth. And no, Trent isn’t disqualified from this lofty inheritance by his perpetual unhappiness. Satie had it just as bad.

In the Spring of 1893, the ever-eccentric Monsieur Erik began a torrid affair with the artist and model Suzanne Valadon. An odd duck in her own right, Madame Valadon kept a goat at her studio to gobble up any of her work that she was unhappy with. After only a single night with Valadon, Erik proposed; the marriage never happened (or if it did, the records of such were later eaten by said goat), but Valadon did move to the room next to Satie’s at the Rue Cortot in Paris. Satie became increasingly obsessed with Valadon, often referring to her as his nanny-goat and filling notebooks with worshipful scrawlings about “her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet.” Indeed, Satie composed his Danses Gothiques as a calmative to restore his composure in the face of the amorous frenzies that Valadon inspired in him. In turn, Valadon painted a portrait of Satie and gifted it to him:

Portrait of Erik Satie by Suzanne Valadon. Who can resist the Pince-Nez? WHO?

Sadly, six months later, the affair ended. One chilly winter evening Valadon vanished, leaving Satie with only his portrait and a broken heart to remember her by. Satie snapped, scrawling in the latter pages of his journals that nothing remained for him “but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.” This is the only intimate relationship that Satie ever had. He would later move to a room in Arcueil and in the 27 years before he drank himself to death, there is no record of anyone visiting his room.

Trent Reznor and Erik Satie are two angst-brothers who can fuck your shit up with nothing but a minor key and a couple of quarter notes. This fact makes it a little difficult to find good YouTube recordings of Erik Satie, since every weirdo jackass in the world (including me) can play either Gnossiennes or Gymnopedies. It takes virtually no technical skill to play these – only a sense of musicality. Satie’s works are the great equalizers for pianists who obsess over technical skill at the expense of poetic ability. Today, that same simplicity gets Reznor blown off as untalented and musically immature, while it often renders Satie all the honors of every academy.

The Trent and Erik Awesome Show, GREAT JOB!

I get it, I get it. You liked Nine Inch Nails as a kid and now that you’re all grown up and super-hip, you want revenge on your youth; your teen years, to be specific. Me, too. Mine’s not a pretty one: moonlight teal eyeliner and an inexcusably long devotion to VNV Nation. But guess what? Neon Indian will still ironically love you if you admit that Nine Inch Nails is, or at least was, outstanding.

Or is it this: Gristle and Puppy are “real industrial” while NIN is merely a late-era aping of the Old Gods, and NIN is just one among billions of bands about which you mindlessly mouth the mantra “I only like their old stuff.” Pretty Hate Machine, and maybe you’ll count The Downward Spiral as listenable. Maybe. (If you don’t at least respect The Downward Spiral as potentially the most vivid musical depiction of capital s, capital d Self Destruction, then you haven’t heard it, or you weren’t listening when you did.) You can say what you want about With Teeth and not a soul will object, but don’t blow off The Fragile or even Year Zero because they aren’t marked with that eighties/early nineties seal of hipster approval.

Portrait of the heir apparent as a fellow absinthe enthusiast. (Still from “The Perfect Drug” NIN music video, 1997.)

At the very least, you should acquaint yourselves with the works for solo piano that Trent has written, most appearing on Still. A close comparison between these and the works of Satie reveals an authentic despair dislocated from the confines of technical prowess and pronounced in a primordial tongue of death and failure powerful enough to move even the most jaded art-school dropout.

Only the most cutting edge eyewear for these fine gentlemen.

Deconstructing the work of Reznor or Satie is difficult; so many of the works that they offer us are already deconstructed, spindled and broken skeletons of black keys always-already slipping away into silence. To be sure, both composers have their richer works: one thinks of Year Zero’s “The Great Destroyer” or Satie’s Nocturnes, but Satie’s essential influence upon NIN has been the ability to achieve tremendous libidinal impact with only a small series of simple notes.

We can hear this clearly in Satie’s most popular works, Gnossienes and Gymnopedies. There, the notes themselves, in their staggered simplicity, command our rapt fascination and recall to us the simplest facts of the human condition: gravity, monotony, absurdity, and death, each dislodged from their traditional home in the richness of melancholy, and disclosed to us in a primordial simplicity.

In Nine Inch Nails, we find this same simplicity inherited directly from Satie, and elaborated with Reznor’s own brand of anguish. There are many works, especially late in the catalogue, that proclaim loudly their direct lineage from Satie’s brand of profundity: “Gone, Still” (video below); “The Persistence of Loss”; and “The Frail” announce this heritage, clearly structured on the outlines first sketched by Satie. What Reznor adds to Satie’s original recipe is the idea that a truly essential articulation of loss, despair, or death shines forth through even the most cacophonous storms of sound; the Satiean themes can be heard in the depths of the mad structure of “The Wretched” and as the haunting erotic refrain of “Closer”.

Trent confirms this thesis himself when he destructures many of his richer works on the album Still: there one can hear “The Becoming” stripped away of all industrial noise and samples and it is difficult not to imagine those somber, slow, simple notes being tapped out by anyone other than Satie himself.