Thursday, 10/31/02

All this morning and most of last night I've had Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" in my head -- the slow, mopey song about self-loathing on an album otherwise full of fast, angry songs about self-loathing. I haven't heard it in probably four or five years, but it was instantly recognizable as it came over the radio, even being performed mostly on an acoustic guitar by Johnny Cash. It's completely faithful, deadpan, genius.

Where the original version layers about fifty synthy guitars to get its point across, Cash achieves much the same effect with a guitar, a piano, and a couple of string instruments. On a night of spooky Halloween-themed songs, this was the scariest.

The Cash album, "The Man Comes Around", comes out on Election Day. Until then, if you have a computer that can hack streaming Windows Media (I had to reinstall Windows Media for Mac OS X before it would work), you might be able to pluck it out of KEXP's streaming archive, from Riz's 10/30 variety mix, about 2 minutes in.

Of course, it'll only be up there for two weeks, because webcast archives that remain available longer than that are illegal. Praise be to the lobbying muscle of the recording industry. 02:38PM «

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