Personal, subjective rankings with a short commentary.

Number 2

“Reptile” by Nine Inch Nails

Album: The Downward Spiral (1994, Nothing/Interscope)

Track: 12

Runtime: 6:52

Near the end of The Downward Spiral, by Nine Inch Nails, we get “Reptile.” What begins as a quiet industrial sounds (a construction site? A pile-driver’s regular insistent rhythm?) is met with a few seconds of violin strings being plucked. Then without warning, the listener gets slammed with more loud industrial sounds (Folding? Metallic?). Simultaneously symphonic and primitive, “Reptile” acts as a pendant to the famous “Closer” at the beginning of the album. The sordid dream-like lyrics recall the violent excess of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.

“She leaves a trail of honey
To show me where she’s been”

[…]

“Oh, my beautiful liar
Oh, my precious whore
My disease, my infection
I am so impure”

The song becomes a prelude for the album coda, “Hurt.” Primal and sludgy, the song harnesses together images of insects and disease, angels and machines. Nine Inch Nails brought industrial music popular acclaim, tinged with scandal and Trent Reznor’s dark genius. With “Reptile,” he exposes the inadequacy of language itself in confronting the gross rot of existence and conventional morality’s failure to contain humanity’s coarsened animalistic instincts. The Serpent didn’t tempt Eve, the Serpent is inside us all. We clothe ourselves in its scales and mistake our perversions for virtue.