To me, rock music was never meant to be safe. I think there needs to be an element of intrigue, mystery, subversiveness. Your parents should hate it.
Interpretation
Rock music should challenge norms and provoke strong reactions.
Trent Reznor expresses that rock music should be daring and provocative, designed to evoke strong feelings and push boundaries. He suggests that its essence lies in being intriguing and somewhat rebellious, resonating particularly with the younger generation who may find it in contrast to their parents' tastes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the evolving nature of music genres.
Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.
I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.
You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.
My music has been a sort of personal therapy. It's got me out of tough times, it has been the friend that I needed, when I didn't have a friend there.
I've attended many concerts where I felt let down and I was wishing it would be something else. Not that it's their duty to please me, but at the same time, I think a lot about what it's like through the eyes of the consumer, the fan. I want not to pander to the audience, but to be aware of them.
I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways. But I also see why it's appealing - I've had that little high you get from posting stuff online. But then you think, 'Did I need to say that?' I've explored that enough to know to stay kind of quiet these days.
I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.
So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.
On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.
I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.
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