Lollapalooza 2008: Laser-lit Nine Inch Nails bring festival to a close with not-so-wretched set

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails belts out a chorus during his Lollapalooza headliner set Sunday. All photos and video, Brad Flora. Note: All photos were taken by aiming my point and click at the video monitors overhead. No pit access for this joker.

Updated with setlist and more videos, Monday 1:00 pm

48 hours after Radiohead lulled a massive crowd at Lollapalooza 2008 and 24 hours after Rage Against the Machine incited it to violence on a scale not seen in recent years, Nine Inch Nails performed a lush, challenging set that seemed to satisfy those who stuck it out.

Rumors hit the internet earlier this week that NIN architect Trent Reznor was pulling out of his Sunday headlining slot only to be shot down by an image posted to NIN.com, a snapshot of Rage Against the Machine's performance taken from backstage, presumably by Reznor himself.

The show comes amidst a resurgence for the band, due, some say, to Reznor's embrace of all-digital forms of music distribution, use of guerrilla, interactive marketing and his decision to keep releasing new music at a prodigious pace.

The Setlist

1,000,000

Discipline

Closer

Intrumental

Piggy

The Warning

Vessel

Wish

Terrible Lie

Survivalism

Only

The Hand that Feeds

Echoplex

Hurt

In This Twilight

The set started off with 1,000,000 from "The Slip," released in May as a free digital download.

Watch the first minute below:

Another highlight from the early part of the set was "Closer," the so-filthy-it's-awesome song that every kid I knew in 1997 was trying to track down.

Watch the first minute below:

As is to be expected, Nine Inch Nails' light show did not disappoint, bathing the industrial band in flickering strobes, lasers and at one point a kind of rusted chain-link pattern. One of the more memorable effects was also one of the simpler ones, a digital backdrop that cast the band in stark silhouettes.

Mallets galore

After a spirited launch, the set cooled as Reznor and his band (which included someone sporting a kicking Malcolm Gladwell fro) stepped into a percussion instrumental.

The aforementioned guitar player with a Malcolm Gladwell do.

During what I'll call the "mallet interlude," Reznor himself was not visible on stage at times and the music dragged a bit. At one point, from my vantage point out in the crowd, the already unusually-quiet-for-a-rock-festival music was drowned out by all the people suddenly talking around me (perhaps it was a taste of my own medicine after talking during Radiohead).

Reznor looking a lot older than I'd like him to....means we're all getting older, too, etc.

From where I stood, it seemed like a lot of people were heading for the exit around this time. Kanye West had started up his set on the other end of the park and the faint strains coming from it were also about as loud as the plunky, moody music coming from the stage. Also, Kanye definitely sounded like he was having a lot more fun over there.

I followed a group out to the main entrance onto the Northern field to compare incoming bodies to outgoing bodies. You can see the video I captured above and judge for yourself whether people were coming or going to see NIN. It looked about even to me.

Reznor, looking creepy.

The instrumental break came to a close and the band played "Piggy" another mellow song, but certainly more accessible than mallets and a dark stage.

The video below gives a glimpse of the scene near the back of the crowd, in front of the nearby Playstation stage during the song. I found it a spooky scene, a bit like a nightmare version of evening at a Disney theme park, trash everywhere, city lights in the background, worn-out, bedraggled wandering in and out of an industrial street lamp. That's garbage you hear crunching under my feat. Despite ubiquitous recycling and trash bins all over the festival, the standing areas were still a mess after every performance all weekend long. You'll see bins in the clip below.

The last song I caught before ducking out to try and catch some of Kanye's set was a powerful rendition of "Wish," which the band turned into a real pulverizer.

Watch a snippet below:

A Well-received Set

Fans I spoke with afterward said Nine Inch Nails' performance lived up to their high expectations. The refrain common to the half-a-dozen people I spoke with went like this:

"So awesome. So awesome."

The Hacky Man

One guy who definitely enjoyed the show was the ball-capped, 40ish guy in a shredded t-shirt who seemed to be everywhere that weekend, playing hacky sack. At first you think he's just an eccentric dancer, then you notice the sack. In the clip below, you can see him go to town near stage-right at the Nine Inch Nails show.

Heading Home

The crowd that left the Kanye and NIN shows was noticeably more laid-back and less amped-up than the throngs that streamed out after Saturday's Rage Against the Machine set. The police I spoke with said that they hadn't any more officers on hand than the previous night, but they weren't seeing anywhere near the aggression levels from people walking home. Nevertheless, the entire west-edge fence had been pulled down starting from Balbo up about a block and police were forcefully restraining a man on the curb on Michigan avenue for drunkeness, so there were still some winkles from a security standpoint, just nowhere near the total failure of the night before.

As I did not stay through the end of the performance, there are some things missing from this write-up that you could help with: Setlist, reports from the front-of-barricades, more thoughts on how NIN worked as festival closer.