Year Zero

[[JiF]AlbieDamned]

Is anyone else a Nine Inch Nails fan? I just got the new album, Year Zero, a few days ago. But it's more than an album. He (Trent Reznor) has created this huge alternate reality game. It's set 15 years in the future with global warming, constant threat of terrorism, and a religious US government fighting wars all over the world while putting drugs in the water to keep the population in line. Then this mysterious thing called "The Presence" starts appearing all over the world. It looks like a giant hand reaching down from the sky. It's the cover art of the album. The album is basically a soundtrack to all this. Each song is about the situation, told from a different point of view.

The way this has all been brought to light is fascinating. It started with a tour t-shirt released back in the winter that had certain letters capitalized, which led to a website http://www.iamtryingtobelieve.com. Then there were USB drives found in bathrooms at other concerts with some songs from the album, mysterious image files, and sound clips. They've led to all these other web sites which keep revealing more and more. Apparently this will be going on, with more and more revealed, for 18 months and culminating in another album which presumably reveals the ending.

They staged an event in April where they sent cell phones to a bunch of fans in LA who had registered on one of the sites. They all received calls telling them to meet at a certain place and time. When they got there, they all signed waivers and then got on a bus with black drapes over the windows, and were driven to some secret location in an industrial park. Then some guy gave this impassioned speech about the importance of independent thought and resisting. And then they were taken down an elevator to an underground room where NIN was waiting and gave a brief concert. After 5 or 6 songs a swat team swarmed in with guns blazing and broke the thing up. It was all fake of course, but the people there didn't know it at first. They videoed the whole thing, which you can see here: http://files.opensourceresistance.net/L ... gLarge.mov.

Like I said, the whole thing is fascinating. It's incredible how much work and planning must be going into this. There are dozens of sites up now, with names like http://www.anotherversionofthetruth.com and http://www.bethehammer.net and http://www.artisresistance.com. You can read about the whole thing here: http://www.ninwiki.com/Main_Page. Here's a YouTube video with a sighting of The Presence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBf2gyCT_qY&NR=1. And here's another video from the official NIN site: http://boss.streamos.com/download/inter ... ero_hi.mov.

Oh, and by the way, the album is incredible. Much better than With Teeth, the last album, which I thought was good but a little bit of a disappointment when compared to The Fragile and The Downward Spiral.

[[JiF]rIot]

Thats weeiiirrd stuff!

[[JiF]AlbieDamned]

I can't believe nobody else is interested in this. I've been reading about it non-stop for the past 4 or 5 days, while listening to the album constantly. It's incredibly detailed. I just can't get enough of it.

[[JiF]rIot]

Does NIN know something we don't!?

[[JiF]AlbieDamned]

Does NIN know something we don't!?

Not really. It's a pretty reasonable projection of the near-term future if things continue in the current direction, with a few flourishes thrown in to make it interesting (like the government putting a calming drug in the water supply to keep the population quiet). The Year Zero timeline starts with a major dirty bomb attack by Islamic jihadists in Los Angeles in 2009, during the Academy Awards (see http://www.hollywoodinmemoriam.org). We respond by nuking Iran and North Korea, and by cracking down even harder on civil liberties in the name of security. Is this really all that unrealistic? Think about our response to 9/11.

[[JiF]rIot]

True, but I don't think we'd be so quick to use a nuke even after such an attack.