All my fellow edgy 90s goth/headbanger friends: “He called it ‘Nine Inch Nails’ because that was the size of the nails that were used to nail Jesus to the cross”
Then watching an interview with Trent in a documentary 20 years later: “I just thought it sounded cool at the time”.
Never ask your fav musicians for the reasoning behind something. It always means less to them than it does to you.
actual nine inch nails are probably too big to nail someone to a cross with, they’re huge!
The nails in the NIN branded nail gun ammo crates in Quake sure as fuck weren’t nine inch long.
But they still gave enemies a….
Head like a hole 😎
We all know it’s Johnny Cashs song now though.
They are both great. Johnny’s is definitely more than ok. Even subjectively speaking. You can say you dont like it, or it’s not for you, but objectively, it hits many nails on many heads and is an excellent version. Im not a fan of either band/artist. NiN has some great songs that i have heard. Johnny cash does, too. Hurt is definitely one of the best from both (of what i have heard)
I like the original key better - may have been harder for Cash to sing in, though
His version is better yeah
And I am a NIN fan through and through, this isn’t even a competition when Trent changes his version’s lyrics to match Johnny’s
Lisan al Gaib?
So did he have a worm bin.
I fucking hate that it feels like JC “stole” the songs identity from NIN. IMO it sounds awful, there’s so much more raw emotion in Trents voice. Ugh, give credit to the man who actually wrote it.
Being a huge NIN fan, I’m completely biased and agree that Trent’s version has a bigger impact. But it’s important to know that Trent is definitely a fan of Cash’s cover.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Trent is definitely a fan of Cash’s cover
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I honestly don’t like the JC version. He’s iconic so I’ve never said it out loud but it sounds like your uncle doing karaoke to me.
To me he sounds pretty lifeless and dead, but I’ve never liked any of his music. I like your description though!
My biggest beef with the Cash version is “crown of thorns”. It’s almost as bad as when Ceelo sang “all religions true”.
Unpopular opinion: I think “Hurt” itself is overrated, and everyone just likes it because it happened to become one of the hit songs off the Downward Spiral. I think songs like Mr. Self Destruct and Eraser are what you really want if you want a display of raw, fucked up emotions.
I’ll say that I hated the JC version at first.
Then I saw the video and it turned me around on it. Now, it’s a decent cover. I’m not so much of a fan of NIN that I can’t appreciate a cover of the music by someone else. I don’t really know a lot about Cash, but the imagery in the video was just really powerful.
That being said, anyone crediting Cash with the song, apart from the fact that he covered it, is shameful. Yes, he sang those words. He didn’t write them; so the meaning behind the lyrics are not his own. He applied his own take on them, sure, but the credit should go to the original author for the context of the song.
The fact that people are so stupid as to think it’s Cash’s song, is just another nail in the coffin of the intelligence of humanity (or at least my faith in it). Having people say this kind of dumb shit about the song, and implying their attribution of credit for the lyrics to Cash, is just testament to the erosion of wisdom from humanity.
It’s so appropriate that we live in an age of unparalleled access to information, nearly the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips nearly all the time, and yet, people are so willfully uneducated, and so defensive about what they know, that even when faced with incontrovertible proof from that pool of human knowledge that they are, in fact, very wrong in their thinking, only to have them argue against such information futility, is the exact problem with humans. We have such an ego about what we know and that we cannot be wrong about something that we will defend something that’s clearly wrong to our dying breath with absolute and completely misplaced conviction, for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we are somehow infallible.
Being wrong is part of the human experience. You will get things wrong more often than you get them right. What defines you as a person, is how you deal with that inevitability. Do you rail against the truth? Do you consider your position and listen to the arguments against? Or do you bury your head in the sand (or up your own ass), so you don’t have to listen to the dissenters?
IMO, this is the root reason why religion still exists. If you look at how common that is, with all the people blindly following, and defending it, with every fiber of their being, it’s obvious that we are still, a very, very idiotic race; willing to accept anything as truth simply because we were told that it is at a very young age… Before we were capable of criticising the absurdity of it all. Is there a God? 72% of the earth would say yes. And therein lies the problem. If almost three quarters of people are willing to believe in a sky genie with no proof more reliable than ink on paper and the assurance of others, then what fucking hope do we have of getting anything else right?
