In the smoke-filled 90’s, when grunge took over the musical landscape, a lot of bands had to go to great lengths to hide early pictures of themselves with big hair and make-up.
Every band has embarrassing early gigs and pictures that live on forever on the Internet, which makes it a lot harder for bands to flat out deny they don’t exist, so it’s best to admit it and try to move on.
The fact that Pantera used to have big hair and silly stage names like Rex Rocker didn’t hurt the band’s rep, and finally Larry Lalonde from Primus is willing to admit he played guitar in the Bay Area death metal band Possessed, which he refused to talk about for many years.
However, an interviewer incorrectly told Larry he helped create the death metal genre, which isn’t true because LaLonde didn’t write much music in the band.
A lot of this stuff is like your high school year book picture, where you look back at your clothes and hair and wonder what on earth were you thinking, and Nine Inch Nails smartly made fun of themselves first before the net could rank on them first. Apparently NIN appeared on Dance Party USA, which was one of the lamest dance shows ever. It was on afternoons on the USA network, and it was pretty unwatchable, even for laughs.
This was not Nine Inch Nails territory at all, think more Debbie Gibson and New Kids on the Block, but somehow they appeared on the show, and as Guitar World reports, NIN leader Trent Reznor recently tweeted about this silliness, which has already gotten over 220,000 views on YouTube.
Maybe someone alerted Trent to this and he’s doing damage control, but he wrote: “Many years ago, a young and naïve Nine Inch Nails were asked what TV shows they’d be interested in appearing on. As a joke (and likely drunk), they thought of the most absurd choice they could come up with at the time. They were then informed their bluff had been called and were actually booked on said show.
“They hopped in their Honda Civic touring vehicle (hatchback) and traveled many miles to (I think) NJ for the big show. They had a laugh making fun of the people, their fashion choices and hairstyles. Life was good. Years later, the internet is discovered… There’s a moral in there somewhere. Come to think of it, Skrillex may indeed owe me some publishing on that hairdo…”
Actually, there is indeed a moral here. If you’re caught on tape doing stupid sh*t, like the Star Wars lightsaber kid or a sex tape, either own up to it or don’t comment on it at all, because it’s going to be all over the place for everyone to see some day, and live on in infamy in cyberspace forever.
