Piggy (song)

"Piggy"
Single by Nine Inch Nails
from the album The Downward Spiral
Released	December 1994
Format	Promotional CD
Recorded	10050 Cielo Drive, Beverly Hills, California
Genre	Industrial rock, alternative rock
Length	4:24
Label	Nothing Records, Interscope
Writer(s)	Trent Reznor
Producer(s)	Trent Reznor, Flood
Nine Inch Nails singles chronology
"Burn" (1994) "Piggy" (1994) "Hurt" (1995)

"Piggy" is a song by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, and the second track of The Downward Spiral (1994). It was written by Trent Reznor, co-produced by Flood, and recorded in "Le Pig" (10050 Cielo Drive). The song is well known for being Reznor's only live drumming performance.

Recording

Reznor wrote the song after Broken (1992) was completed. It was initially a poem which he expanded into a full song. He later moved to a house famous for its status as the site of the gruesome Tate murders, on July 4, 1992, and created a studio space there, calling it "Le Pig."^[1] When asked about the building where production on the song was done, Reznor responded that he chose it merely for space considerations, claiming not to have been aware of the house's connection to the murders until after he chose it. "I looked at a lot of places," Reznor said. "And this just happened to be the one I liked most."^[2]

The studio name, "Le Pig" alludes to the word "PIG" written with Tate's blood on the front door by the murderers, itself a reference to a The Beatles song of the same name. This incident introduced Reznor to their 1968 album, the White Album, which included "Piggies".^[3]

The frantic drumming on the outro is Reznor's only attempt at performing drums on the record, and one of the few "live" drum performances on the album. He had stated that the recording was from him testing the microphone setup in studio, but he liked the sound too much not to include it.^[4]

In recent 2015 Filter Concert performances in support of Coal Chamber, singer/guitarist Richard Patrick alluded to a potential new connection to the song "Piggy." During a concert at Rams Head Live! in Baltimore, Maryland, Patrick commented on the numerous amounts of Nine Inch Nails t-shirts in the audience. He went on to state "You know, I used to be in Nine Inch Nails. When I first started, one of our techs came to me and said "Trent says your name is going to be Piggy." I said "OK, whatever man." "Apparently when left he was pretty broken up about it because he wrote a song about me." Patrick would later confirm that the bad blood between Reznor and himself was "In the past."

Music and lyrics

This is the first NIN song to use the line "nothing can stop me now", which concludes the track. The phrase appears often in Reznor's later writing, making appearances in the songs "Ruiner", "Big Man with a Gun", "La Mer", "We're in This Together", and "Sunspots".^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]}

A leitmotif used throughout the album first appears on "Piggy". Pictured here is the pattern (transposed to A) on the album's title track.

Quiet and slow overall, the song's tempo is 65 BPM, and played in the key of B. It is also the first track on the album to use "The Downward Spiral leitmotif", albeit on the organ.^[11]

Release and reception

"Piggy" was released as a promotional single on The Downward Spiral, on December 1994. The single was not labeled as a halo number, and has no music video created in promotion of the song. It reached the Top 20 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, making the album fly upwards to number 62.^[12] "Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)," a remix of "Piggy," appears on The Downward Spiral's accompanying remix album, Further Down the Spiral (1995). The subtitle is the "nothing can stop me now" lyric.

References

Bibliography

• Huxley, Martin (1997). Nine Inch Nails. Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-15612-X. 

External links

• "Piggy" at NinWiki.com