Sound, throb, and a long low wail of pure, hard pain... Nine Inch Nails. The world's most disturbing rock band is in effect one man singer and songwriter Trent Reznor. Since stealing the show during the original Lollapalooza tour in 1991, NIN has limned the hard edge of the techno revolution. In Reznor's desperate, combative persona and disarrayed melodies the musical community has finally found a band that appalls, confounds, and undeniably attracts. Horrified yet entranced, NIN's fans are like moths drawn toward the disfiguring flame of their music. From a well of previously unpublished research, Huxley has carved out the history of this improbable hero: Reznor's rise as an Appalachian outcast to dyspeptic sex symbol; his connections to Courtney Love; and his relationship with his spasmodically fixated fans. Ricocheting wildly between goth rock and industrial grunge, Nine Inch Nails has achieved a legendary sound. Here, Martin Huxley digs hard and deep to unearth the truth beneath the ultimate noise.

What is the world that Nine Inch Nails made, and what was the world that made Nine Inch Nails? These are the questions at the heart of this study of the band's 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine. The album began as after-hours demos by mercenary new wave keyboardist Trent Reznor, and was disciplined into sparse industrial dance by a handful of the UK's best industrial producers. Carr traces how the album became beloved in the underground, found its mass at Lollapalooza, and its market at the newly opened mall store Hot Topic. For fans, Nine Inch Nails was a vehicle for questioning God, society, the family, sex, and the body. In ten raw, heartbreaking oral histories woven through the book, fans living in the post-industrial Midwest discuss the successes and failures of the American dream as they are articulated in Nine Inch Nails' music. Daphne Carr illuminates Pretty Hate Machine as at once singular and as representative of how popular music can impact history and change lives.

New Millennial Sexstyles questions the twin feminist orthodoxies that the 1960s sexual revolution failed women and that the sexual attitudes most prominent in current youth cultures are deplorably regressive. Comparing the American sexscape she inhabits to the vision of contemporary culture produced by feminist theorists, Carol Siegel considers whether the sexual revolution may have succeeded, but in ways not recognized by current academic studies of gender and sexuality. In discouraging undomesticated heterosexuality, academic feminism ignores the connection between mainstream opposition to all unrestrained sexual expression and the growth of new forms of homophobia in our times. At the same time, the youth subcultures' challenges to these views of sexuality and gender have been dismissed as insignificant, or misunderstood as sexist. In this book, they receive more respectful attention. Siegel draws on her own experience as a college student to create a personal history of academic feminism's early sympathy with bourgeois values. She looks at the development of American sex advice literature and at the reception of such ""transgressive"" popular films as Basic Instinct, Thelma and Louise, and Natural Born Killers to demonstrate that the most profoundly capitalist feminist theories have always been the most culturally authoritative. A more encouraging vision emerges in the book's second half, where a record of conversations about sex and gender with young people, and of their responses to products designed for their consumption, takes the reader through some of today's most radical youth cultures and suggests new directions for gender studies.

Since it first emerged from Britain’s punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth’s many dimensions—including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity—and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture, and several draw on their own experiences. The volume’s editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism; its impact on class, race, and gender; and its distinctive features as an “undead” subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to James O’Barr’s graphic novel The Crow. Other essays focus on gothic music, including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie, and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, the subjects ranging from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play. Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism. Contributors: Heather Arnet, Michael Bibby, Jessica Burstein, Angel M. Butts, Michael du Plessis, Jason Friedman, Nancy Gagnier, Ken Gelder, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Joshua Gunn, Trevor Holmes, Paul Hodkinson, David Lenson, Robert Markley, Mark Nowak, Anna Powell, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Schraffenberger, David Shumway, Carol Siegel, Catherine Spooner, Lauren Stasiak, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Chris Smith tells the fascinating stories behind the most groundbreaking, influential, and often controversial albums ever recorded.

Popular culture in the 1990s often primarily reflected millennial catastrophic anxieties. The world was tightening, speeding up, and becoming more dangerous and dangerously connected. Surely it was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. Pop Goes the Decade: The Nineties explains the American 1990s for all readers. The book strives to be widely representative of 1990s culture, including the more obvious nostalgic versions of the decade as well as focused discussions of representations of minority populations during the decade that are often overlooked. This book covers a wide variety of topics to show the decade in its richness: music, television, film, literature, sports, technology, and more. It includes an introductory timeline and background section, followed by a lengthy "Exploring Popular Culture" section, and concludes with a brief series of essays further contextualizing the controversial and influential aspects of the decade. This organization allows readers both a wide exposure to the variety of experiences from the decade as well as a more focused approach to aspects of the 1990s that are still resonant today.

This volume discusses the history of alternative rock and the ethos of alt-rockers as rebels who value independence, experimentation, and truth-telling. Rather than making music for broad commercial appeal, these musicians drew from a variety of styles that were considered unfriendly for consumers. Over the years, alternative rock has spawned mash-ups of garage rock, punk, new wave, rap, thrash, and hardcore. This group of indie rockers not only created a new sound but also put forth a different attitude, as they outwardly rejected the musical standards and sales practices set by major record companies.