Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor accused famous bands of lip syncing at Coachella in a new Stereogum interview.
“I had a kind of awakening a few years ago sitting on my couch watching a Coachella livestream from the comfort of my living room and now that big video wall that you had to pay to bring out is part of the stage. And in the advent of the electronic musician that comes in with a flash drive and plugs in their content and hits the spacebar and music plays and the video plays and seeing 10 bands or acts in a row that it’s all visuals and bullshit — lip-syncing — I think that paradigm’s dead.
Walk into the Sahara Tent at Coachella and you’re surrounded by hundreds of video screens and lazers and you can’t compete with that and people have seen that and it’s not as exciting as it was 20 years ago. So let’s just go play, you know? And not in a stripped-down acoustic way but like, I think about seeing the Cure in the ‘80s and the Jesus And Mary Chain and there was no production other than it’s smokey and kinda scary. Seeing Swans, I was wondering if I was going to be murdered, if my head was going to explode from the bass.
That feeling — I didn’t see that from my couch. I saw lots of clever production and expensive videos. Getting rid of all that shit and stripping it down allows us to kind of do whatever we want. And that opened the door to finally answer your question: Most of what we play is stuff that still feels relevant in some way or feels OK to play. There’s a number of songs that we don’t just because it doesn’t feel like me anymore or it doesn’t feel authentic. And there’s a handful of songs on this tour that I don’t particularly feel an affection towards but because of the novelty of we’ve never played them, I know it’ll be exciting for superfans that seem to live for those type of things.”
