Blogocentric Formulations

Maybe I'm all messed up in you

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DAY 6

Song: "The Only Time"
Artist: Nine Inch Nails
Album: Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Full disclosure, this isn't actually my favorite song on the album, or even in my Top 5. It's actually in the bottom half of the tracks I like, but that's because this album had so many phenomenal songs on it. "Head Like a Hole" and "Sin" are my favorites, but I'm also a big fan of "Kinda I Want To," "Terrible Lie," "Down In It," and "Something I Can Never Have." But this particular track has a special place in my heart because it was playing during one of those moments as a kid where you're completely mortified at the time but can appreciate retelling the story once you're older and a bit removed from the experience.

When I was a teenager, I got really into computer games (this was back in the day when you had to play peer-to-peer by dialing up a buddy with your modem ). At the time, my game of choice was the Quake, the first-person shooter developed by id Software (of Wolfenstein and Doom fame). The friend of mine that I always played games with was really into industrial rock, metal, and hardcore music and he was always burning me a copy of some new CD he got so I could listen to it. Pretty Hate Machine was one of the first albums he gave me to listen to, and I remember really getting into it, especially since its industrial sound fit pretty well with the world of Quake as we ran around trying to shoot one another's avatar.

My parents couldn't stand the music, so I took to closing the door to our home office (where the family computer was located) so I could play and listen to my heart's content and my parents wouldn't be bothered by the heavy beats or the sounds of mayhem and slaughter generated by the game. One day, my dad came into the office to get something for work, and it was timed at just the right moment in this song so that he heard the last lines of the first stanza of the song: "Lay my hands on heaven and the moon and the stars / While the devil wants to f*ck me in the back of his car."

It was one of those moments where my dad just stops in his tracks and I'm thinking "Oh crap, what's he going to do? What's he going to say?" And all he does is say, "Nice, Jeff. Real nice music you got there." And turned around and left the room without whatever it was he had come in to get.

I've listened to the album maybe a hundred times over the years since then, and every single time that song comes on, it takes me right back to that night where my dad walked in and heard probably the most offensive lyrics on the entire album. I think it's safe to say he's not a Nine Inch Nails fan. Oh well; his loss.