Daphne Carr – författare

Best Music Writing has become one of the most eagerly awaited annuals of them all. Celebrating the year in music writing by gathering a rich array of essays, missives, and musings on every style of music from rock to hip-hop to R&B to jazz to pop to blues, it is essential reading for anyone who loves great music and accomplished writing. Scribes of every imaginable sort,novelists, poets, journalists, musicians, are gathered to create a multi-voiced snapshot of the year in music writing that, like the music it illuminates, is every bit as thrilling as it is riveting.

Trent Reznor rode into music mythology on "Pretty Hate Machine", powered by Futurist industrial pistons and covered in ice-spiked synth hooks shined by new wave robots. Then there was his voice. Whispered verses and screamed hooks before Kurt Cobain patented the formula suggested things teens weren't supposed to be thinking, but were. Reznor's brooding prince in PVC persona became the goth archetype that still pervades America over a decade on. Daphne Carr interviews dozens of NIN fans and gets to the heart of Reznor's very personal appeal.

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.