Nine Inch Nails album about war and oppression

This video is called Trent Reznor Year Zero Interview.

By Peter Kloze:

Year Zero: Trent Reznor looks outside himself

26 January 2008

Objective events have a way of catching up with even the most subjective of individuals. Trent Reznor, founder and leading member of the industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails (NIN), is one of the more introspective and self-analyzing artists in modern popular music, yet, like everyone else, he is not and cannot be exempted from the force of events.

Indeed, humanity faces a tempestuous future on account of the present social and economic crisis of capitalism, reverberations of which have impelled Reznor to dedicate two years to the creation of a studio album built around major political issues.

The album under review, Year Zero, was released under his NIN moniker in April 2007, first in streaming format on NIN’s MySpace web page, and subsequently to retailers worldwide under the patronage of the Universal Music Group. NIN’s sixth major studio release since 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine, Year Zero was recently re-released in November as a remix by various admiring musicians and artists.

Conceived of as a dystopia that begins in January 2007 and ends in the year 2022 (re-dubbed under a new international calendar in the story as “Born Again,” or Year Zero), Reznor envisions a United States whose citizens have endured a nuclear war with Iran, come under heavy government surveillance, been drugged with a stupefying substance called “parepin” (introduced into the water supply to supposedly minimize the effect of bio-terrorism attacks) and been forced to live under a government completely at the beck and call of fundamentalist Christians. …

Reznor has created his own dystopian work to make a quite explicit attack on the calamitous domestic and foreign policies of the present US government, from the artistic perspective of a future nightmare world.

“There are no concepts in the [Year Zero] story that aren’t rooted in things that are already happening,” Reznor told online music journal Gigiwise.