Trent Reznor Tuning Out Twitter Because “Idiots Rule”
Nine Inch Nails‘ Trent Reznor may have Twittered for the last time. The recently outspoken frontman contributed a post to the official NIN.com message board in which he confesses his disappointment in the overall negativity of online communities, writing, “We’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.”
Reznor’s short tenure on Twitter was a beneficial one for fans, though some critics argued it was distracting him from his true calling: the music. The NIN leader used the 140-character blog to slam Chris Cornell’s Scream, announce his collaboration with Jane’s Addiction and offer special tour packages to raise money for a heart transplant for Eric De La Cruz. It also gave fans access to Reznor on a more personal level. “I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and ‘human,’ ” he writes. “I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I’m in love and it’s all I think about and that’s that.
“I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality,” Reznor added. “I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am.”
Anytime a celebrity makes himself accessible to the public, the haters feast and a polarizing force like Reznor can often attract an army of them. So who’s to blame for Reznor’s defection from Twitter? According to Reznor, the members of the online community Metal Sludge. “Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across,” Reznor writes in the tirade portion of his post. (Metal Sludge is having a laugh about the whole thing, calling Rez a “miserable little goth bitch.”)
While Reznor didn’t say he was completely finished with Twitter, his often-updated account has been silent since he routed followers to his NIN.com post. “I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result,” Reznor writes. Then he quoted a song by his current tourmates, Jane’s Addiction: “Idiots rule.”
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• Trent Reznor Uses Twitter to Slam Chris Cornell’s “Scream”