Remember When: David Bowie and Trent Reznor came together for perfectly unexpected collaboration
The music of David Bowie and Trent Reznor is not for all tastes, even for those who love hard rock, but their collaboration on "I'm Afraid Of Americans" worked
I’ll start, however oddly, by saying I’ve never really gotten into the music of David Bowie or Trent Reznor. I like a few songs, and that’s it. Sunday marks five years since Bowie passed away, and his 74th birthday would have been this past Friday. Purely based on the uniqueness of what he did, those time stamps bring reason for renewed recognition and acknowledgement.
In a recent interview with Consequence of Sound, Reznor talked about Bowie’s influence on him.
“I think in terms of chronology, it was the Scary Monsters album that I became aware of Bowie’s music. None of my friends were super-big Bowie fans. But there was something about Scary Monsters….And then over the next few years, I had the pleasure of going through Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station. He just really started to become the best archetype for someone who has a fantastic voice and was kind of an actor pretending to be a rock star, in a way,”
Reznor’s band, Nine Inch Nails, opened for Bowie on a 1995 tour. The two acts were at opposite ends of the popularity spectrum.
“Then, to jump ahead a few years and get a phone call from Bowie saying, ‘I’ve made a strange, new album with Eno that kind of reflects the Berlin era…’ Anytime someone would mention him and ask me questions, I would talk about Low and how much he influenced The Downward Spiral, and maybe it crossed his awareness to where he said, ‘You’re the only band I want to play with us. Would you be up for opening for us on an amphitheater tour?’ F**k, yes. I had just got done saying I couldn’t tour for another … We had just toured for two and a half years, and I was imploding. I needed to get off the road. Then, ‘Hey, would you like to go?’ Yes, when are we leaving? ‘How about in a month?’ Okay, I’m right there.”
Touring together eventually yielded a collaboration on a song for Bowie and Reznor (with some of his NIN bandmates). A refurbished version of “I’m Afraid Of Americans”, which was originally written for a Bowie album a couple years earlier, peaked as a Billboard Hot 100 single.
Here’s the video for “I’m Afraid Of Americans.”