If suicidal ideation is Nine Inch Nails’ most famous theme, overwhelming horniness is a close second. There’s no way the man who wrote the 1994 hit “Closer” doesn’t have an appreciation for the feminine form, even if he was allegedly “dismayed” by the public’s interpretation of the song as an anthem of lust. But that, too, points to Trent Reznor as a man with a nuanced understanding of the body and sexuality.
Supporting this theory is an image of a guitar pick allegedly used by Nine Inch Nails “in the 1990s” that recently began making the rounds on Twitter. Emblazoned across it is the bold statement, “There’s no such thing as fake tits.”
Does this mean Reznor is a universal lover of breasts? There is, unfortunately, little clarification about what he or any participating members of Nine Inch Nails could have meant with this pick, or much additional context about its use. A listing on an online auction confirms its existence, though it’s since sold. The only other hint of its validity is from an 11-year-old Reddit AMA with Rob Sheridan, the former creative director of Nine Inch Nails. “I picked up one of Trent’s guitar picks from a show on the Outside Tour which read, ‘There’s no such thing as fake tits,’” one person asked. “Can you shed any light on the origin/inside joke/etc.?”
Sheridan didn’t answer this particular question at the time, however, so it remained a mystery. The question itself does provide a few important clues, though, particularly regarding the year the pick was used. The Outside Tour was headlined by David Bowie and supported by Nine Inch Nails throughout the U.S. between September 14, 1995 and October 31, 1995. A post on Nine Inch Nails’ history website The NIN Hotline also includes an image of the pick, citing it as part of the tour prior, the Self Destruct Tour. The pick could have been used by Reznor himself, or potentially guitarists Robin Finck or Danny Lohner.
Initially, nobody affiliated with the band returned my request for comment, save for pianist Mike Garson, who worked with both Bowie and Nine Inch Nails “I don’t know anything about this one,” he claims.
Some Nine Inch Nails historians/super-fans who carry on The NIN Hotline on Twitter did respond, however. One, Carrie Shetler Clark, said that she “consulted with someone who knows this type of thing, and from what they understand, this is what Trent had printed on his guitar picks for the Downward Spiral Tour.” As for why, she says it’s “probably not too deep. My guess is ‘rock and roll.’”
With Clark’s comment, Rob Sheridan, former creative director of the band from that aforementioned AMA, chimed in on Twitter. “Before my time, but ‘rock and roll’ probably does explain it,” he says. “Different times, but the sentiment is timeless. There were always oft-quoted in-joke mantras in the old NIN camp, like, ‘Punch your balls off,’ or, ‘No smiling in rock & roll.’”
“I asked a couple of friends who were around on that tour, but they couldn’t recall anything about it,” he confirms in an email to me. “That particular (aptly-titled) tour was NIN at the height of angsty, 1990s sex/drugs/rock&roll mayhem and fame (see the “Closure” documentary here for a sense of how chaotic that era was), and there were a lot of in-jokes around that time, phrases said on tour — “punch your balls off” is one — that no one quite remembered how they got started. It could have possibly come from someone in the band, someone on the road crew, maybe a reference to something someone said or just a general statement of affection towards all tits.”
“Women getting up on someone’s shoulders and pulling their tops off to dance to ‘Closer’ was REAL common back then — even on my first NIN tour at the tail end of the 1990s, this was MUCH more common than tours in the 2000s,” he continues. “There was a lot of classic rock & roll debauchery back then, so again, there are a million ways a phrase like this could have become a common running line. The band and crew are, of course, aware that guitar picks get thrown into the crowd and end up amongst fans, so sometimes these things are meant to bewilder anyone who comes across them.”
So, besides it being just a jokey mantra, all we can do is speculate. Perhaps by “there’s no such thing as fake tits,” NIN means to suggest that breast augmentation is a myth, a culturally perpetuated plastic surgery that doesn’t exist. More likely, though, the pick seems to imply that there’s no such thing as fake tits because all tits — augmented or otherwise — are real tits. It’s a metaphysical assertion. Existential, even.
Assuming this is the intended meaning, I have to guess that Reznor is a bit of a big naturals philosopher, much like myself. As I’ve previously discussed, big naturals needn’t be big nor natural in order to earn the label. It’s a state of mind above all else, a condition of embodying breast culture. “There’s no such thing as fake tits” similarly forces us to ask: What are tits, anyway? And what is realness or authenticity? Tits, even those grown by the sheer force of nature, are just a social construct.
There are few other occasions in which Reznor has explicitly talked about breasts. He’s quoted saying in Martin Huxley’s 1997 book Nine Inch Nails that “Closer” is “super-negative and super-hateful. It’s ‘I am a piece of shit and I am declaring that, and if you think you want me, here I am.’ I didn’t think it would become a frat-party anthem or a titty-dancer anthem.” In terms of the latter, as Revolver reported in 2019, “Closer” has endured as a strip-club song for nearly 30 years now.
Maybe this message on the guitar pick was Reznor’s own quiet way of getting ahead of the discourse, a comment upon his music becoming rewritten for breast consumption. As he demonstrated in the video for “Closer,” the pick was another means of communicating a degradation of the boundaries between sacred and profane, of natural and artificial, of real and fake.
Or maybe, as Clark and Sheridan said, it was just rock and roll.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
