Head Like A Hole

In 1989, he was still part zombie.  On the outside, be appeared to everyone else like a normal, living person, working, playing, even dating, but inside he was empty, still trying to build a new persona to occupy that burned-out shell.  Like Devo's Mongoloid, he wore a hat and he had a job and be brought home the bacon, but few people knew that there was no one there inside.  To this day, he still considers himself to have been dead for those years, which is part of the reason that now it's easier for him to consider that past incarnation as a "him" rather than an "I."

Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine was the musical successor to Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey, but in many ways it also represented the mainstreaming of the angry industrial sounds that he often thought that he and he alone appreciated.  The album gave "industrial music a human voice, a point of connection" with its "tortured confusion and self-obsession," and brought "emotional extravagance to a genre whose main theme had nearly always been dehumanization" (Allmusic).  Rolling Stone called it "the first industrial singer-songwriter album."  The song Head Like A Hole got heavy airplay on MTV and it was a little bit jarring to hear the snarling sound of the song sandwiched in between commercials for acne medicine and pop-music videos.  But the commercial success of the album opened the doors for other adventurous bands to be heard as well, and as his healing started to near its completion, there was a lot of new music and new sounds to help him complete his transition back to the living.

Oh yes, and at the end of the year, he moved out to the countryside.