If Trent Reznor drops your name in an interview, it usually isn’t a good thing. In recent memory, Reznor has gone out of his way to bash Interscope, Timbaland, Chris Cornell, Rivers Cuomo, Prince, and his former friend Marilyn Manson. Nobody’s safe from the wrath of Reznor’s loose lips, you see, and now he’s added two more foes to his interview hit list: Gene Simmons and record executives.
“I’d never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work,” Reznor told the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Pocholo Concepcion on his reasons for retiring NIN’s live career. Simmons has actually come up before (“I would hope that I never become Gene Simmons…”), as Reznor likes to use him as an example of the way not to age as a rock star.
Reznor saved his worst venom, however, for record label executives, calling major labels a “Mafia-type run business” and positioning himself as a Robin Hood-esque character for struggling bands. He said the bands of the future should find a business model “where the artist is more fairly represented and has a say and is compensated, and you’re not paying for jets for record label CEOs… They’re in their last moments of death and I’m happy to see them go ’cause they’re all thieves and liars.”
Reznor doesn’t want to be rock’s Prince of Darkness anymore, but the new title Prince of Thieves might actually work.