Nine Inch Nails - Me, I'm Not

It's hard to see what I'm capable of.

Album: Year Zero [fifth album]
Genre: Industrial, Digital Hardcore, IDM, Dance
Album Release: April 17th 2007
Length: 4:52
Producer: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
Vocalist: Trent Reznor [age 41]
Label: Interscope Records

Official Audio


Live in Stockholm from 2007


Live in 2013

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: 5,000,000 +
YouTube Music: 1,400,000 +

Credits & Gear

Bass, drum machine, synthesizers

Details

• Nine Inch Nails encouraged people to remix the song by releasing the .WAV files on their website.
  
  
• Year Zero is a concept album set in a sci-fi, dystopian world of 2022. 2022 was selected by Reznor as the year society would end and start again. The album is atmospheric and creates a sense of dread, while also sounding futuristic by using pulses, beeps, sine waves, echoes, and a distorted low end.
  
  The album uses the structure of music in a way that's unpredictable, for example. the drums will get louder for two beats before returning to normal. The effect is jarring. Reznor intonates at a normal volume before falling into a whisper, only to return to a high pitch for one word only to whisper again. It makes the music sound alien and unfamiliar, as if the character is confused. 
  
  Traditionally, music makes sense because it's predictable. It establishes patterns, only to break them and re-establish them once more. 'Me, I'm Not', has a sonic pallette, or lexicon, of its own, the sounds employed are certainly unconventional, but it retains the syntax necessary to make it understandable. The patterns are still there, just not necessarily where you would expect them to be.
  
  
• Year Zero would be Reznor's last LP on Interscope Records. He said the label were ripping-off honest fans by charging absurd amounts of money for the album. At the time an album would sell for £14 and cost around £1 to produce. Reznor even encouraged the 'theft' of his work from illegal websites such as Napster. He told a crowd in Australia 'steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing.' 
  
  
• The American military have used Nine Inch Nails songs to torture prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center and other such facilities. After repeated exposure, sometimes lasting days, prisoners were reported to have started beating their heads against the wall for relief.
   

Artwork