© PETE CRONIN/ICONICPIX
In the spring of 1997, US current affairs magazine Time published a cover story on the 25 Most Influential People in America. Nestled unexpectedly among heavyweight names from the worlds of politics, science and sport sat that of a man whose music, the publication wrote, “is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex, suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy”.
How, middle-class America could be forgiven for asking, as it thumbed through the issue in question, had it come to this: where the name Trent Reznor, of a band called Nine Inch Nails, was sharing column inches with US Secretaries Of State present and future?