Reznor Takes Bowie On A Hellish Ride

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The thought of Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor as a menacing taxi driver would be enough to strike terror in the hearts of the calmest of men. All the more reason he's the absolutely perfect villain for David Bowie's new video, "I'm Afraid Of Americans," which premiered at 1 a.m. Oct. 28 on MTV's "120 Minutes" and went into heavy rotation on the channel that day.

"Trent is the personification of the foreigners' idea of paranoia in America," says Bowie, with a charming laugh. "The cipher is the (Robert) De Niro character in 'Taxi Driver.' Trent offered to do it; he got quite off on the idea."

The video was directed by the hot British team of Dom&Nick. Bowie played the paranoid foreigner in the clip, which features a few nice inside jokes for those familiar with the music video community and New York taxis.

Despite his obvious fondness for Reznor now, Bowie says he wasn't instantly smitten when he first heard Reznor on Nine Inch Nails' 1990 album, Pretty Hate Machine. "I thought 'Pretty Hate Machine' was interesting (but) fairly one-dimensional," says Bowie. "Then when I heard (1994's) 'The Downward Spiral,' I thought this was a really gifted musician." The two finally met during rehearsals for a 1995 tour in which Nine Inch Nails opened for Bowie.

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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