Music Reviews
Artist:
Nine Inch NailsTitle:
Capital GLabel:
Island
Capital G is taken from the latest Nine Inch Nails studio Year Zero which was released in April this year. It is a stark, bleak and quite terrifying concept album that describes Reznor's forecast of how the United States government's current policies will impact the world fifteen years in the future. At the point where music becomes more than entertainment and presents a conceptual social commentary, Year Zero and Capital G are updated, sophisticated extensions of what bands like The Clash aimed for at their most polemic.
Brilliant multi-platform promotion has led to an alternate reality game to promote the album's concept with clues hidden within tour merchandise leading to websites that describe an "Orwellian picture of the United States circa the year 2022."
As for the song itself, it lyrically attacks the Bush government via the mouth of an incandescent narrator “I pushed a button and elected him to office and a/He pushed a button and it dropped a bomb.” Musically, it is backwards-looking rather than pushing at any kind of barriers, it repeats the industrial, techno stylings of mid-90’s NIN, with computer bleeps and static harking back to a recent technological past and in that sense offering a bit of a comfort blanket for the horrors it foretells.
For such a sophisticated concept, the single appears in limited versions, the reason is best described by Trent Reznor himself, “The point is, I am trying my best to make sure the music and items NIN puts in the marketplace have value, substance and are worth you considering purchasing. I am not allowing Capital G to be repackaged into several configurations that result in you getting ripped off.”
An integrity lacking in the politicians he attacks so well.
