The Becoming

Nine-Inch Nails. "The Becoming." Album: The Downward Spiral (track 7). "Flood" and Trent Reznor, producers. Trent Reznor listed as writer and arranger (genius.com, linked below). Released: 1994. As of April 2023, on-line at YouTube; lyrics and brief comments available here.[1]

Anonymous "Genius" annotation (as of 15Ap23): "The seventh track on The Downward Spiral describes a transformation from man to machine, possibly figuratively, as Trent Reznor loses his ability to feel. This loss of feeling is described as liberation; at the time of recording The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor was in quite a ‘dark place’, exacerbated by drug (ab)use."

Joshua Ellis: "'The Becoming' [...] is about a human in the process of becoming a cyborg and lamenting the loss of his humanity" (e-mail, 29Jun04).

As Ellis notes, the lyrics are "widely available on the web," so users of the Wiki can check this out themselves. Since the "Outro" ending the song is a much-repeated repetition of "It won't give up, it wants me dead / Goddamn this noise inside my head," we'll go with Ellis on lamentation rather than the anonymous annotator's "liberation."

See/Listen to for theme of machine take-over in the sense of desensitization, forcible cyborgization, and a form of dehumanization.

RDE/Joshua Ellis, 2004 and 15Ap23