“Not My Song Anymore:” Exploring Johnny Cash’s Deconstruction of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” by Logan Simpson
In May of 1994, alternative rock band Nine Inch Nails released their album The Downward Spiral, which included the song “Hurt” (Reznor). The song has since been a fan favorite. Written by lead singer Trent Reznor, “Hurt” tells the story of a sad and lonely young man with masochistic tendencies, his way of dealing with the loneliness and addiction that mark his existence. It really is a very sad song.
“I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel,” the song begins. Trent Reznor’s clear but hushed vocals afford the song a pained tone. Lines such as “The needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting,” imply that the speaker is a drug abuser, presumably an addict. Thus, the picture of the subject comes into focus: a young drug-addicted man who is struggling to deal with the sorrow of his existence, asking himself, “What have I become?” out of disbelief at where he is thus far in his life. He is lonely, lamenting that, “everyone (he) know(s) goes away in the end,” while stating to anyone who dares stay near, “I will let you down. I will make you hurt.” The song depicts a man disillusioned with his life, pained by his memories (“Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair”), disappointed by his “friends” (“You are someone else, I am still right here”), and numbed by it all (“Beneath the stains of time, the feelings disappear”). The song concludes: “If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself. I would find a way.” The speaker longs for a second start, a new beginning, wishing to still be himself, just with a clean slate.
According to Reznor, the song can be interpreted to be about himself: “I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone” (Sharples).
For several years, “Hurt” enjoyed the “good life” as far as songs are concerned. It was routinely played as the finale at Nine Inch Nails concerts, climbed the charts, and refused to fade away as “just another song.” Its clear depiction of its speaker surely accounts for a large part of this, representing a very relatable example for the band’s young fan base.
Then in November of 2002, iconic singer Johnny Cash got a hold of Reznor’s song. Far past his prime, slowly failing in health, Cash released his penultimate album American IV: Man Comes Around, which features a cover of “Hurt” (Cash). Musically, the song is not terribly different. Cash uses an acoustic guitar instead of Nine Inch Nails’ electric guitar, but the notes are essentially the same. He changes one word, replacing the line “I wear this crown of shit,” with “I wear this crown of thorns,” but otherwise leaves the original lyrics intact. Yet, when Reznor heard Johnny Cash’s version for the first time, he reportedly said, “By the end I was really on the verge of tears,” later saying, “that song isn’t mine anymore” (Sharples).
Johnny Cash’s deconstruction of Reznor’s song accounts for this dramatic shift in meaning. The cover itself represents a deconstructive effort, as it flips one overarching binary that would not have otherwise been perceived, though it is at work in the original version: the youth/age binary.
Cash recorded “Hurt” at the age of 70, less than a year before his death on September 12, 2003 and just a few months before the death of his wife June Carter Cash on May 15, 2003 (Deutsch).
The speaker in the original version described above, though the text never explicitly indicates one way or the other, is understood to be a young man. Nothing would prompt any different interpretation. But by covering “Hurt” near the imminent end of his life, Cash forces a different perspective onto the text. The speaker now becomes an aged man, looking back on a very long existence and ahead at a very short one. Unlike Reznor’s speaker, he has little time to rectify any disappointments. Through this decentering of youth in the age/youth binary, Cash reveals popular culture’s privileging of youth over age. That Cash’s cover has produced such an epiphanal effect on its listeners demonstrates the total absence of age on the pop culture radar. Youth is everything. Cash removes youth as the reference point and places age in the center. From such a perspective, “Hurt” takes on an entirely new meaning.
For example, “The needle tears a hole” no longer conjures up images of a heroin addict (though Cash’s younger years were marked by well-documented drug abuse), but rather an elderly man in failing health who must inject medication regularly, as it is “the old familiar sting.” It is the routine, unavoidable, and necessary pain to which this new speaker has resigned himself that he may continue clinging to life and what little health remains.
The new speaker places himself “upon (his) liar’s chair,” wearing a “crown of thorns.” Rather than a “crown of shit,” Cash opts for a more meaningful line that alludes to the crucifixion—Jesus executed and mocked as a self-proclaimed king. The speaker identifies with Christ, seeing himself as the fraudulent self-proclaimed king that Jesus represented in the minds of his adversaries. Unlike in Reznor’s “Hurt,” these lines do not simply convey a low self-image on the speaker’s part, but a low view of the speaker’s already-lived life. He is not lamenting who he is at this point in life, but rather who the years say he is. No longer merely looking back at a few wasted years, lines such as “Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair” convey sorrow at looking back over the decades. The speaker indicates an inescapable dissatisfaction with a life already spent, saying of all that he has labored for, “You could have it all, my empire of dirt.” The quantity of years behind Cash’s speaker strengthens the meaning of Reznor’s lyrics—so many more futile efforts, so many more disappointments, so many more mistakes—culminating in a heart-wrenching lament that the speaker can never go back, can never make it better, can never put it all to rest. Time is running out.
Whereas Reznor’s speaker is angry at his abandonment by friends and peers, who always “go away in the end,” presumably by means of rejection, Cash again creates new meaning by decentering youth and placing an aged man at the center of the song: “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” His friends are dying, one by one. Those that have not, he realizes, will follow suit before too long. So will he. These are no longer people who have rejected the speaker and walked away—these are loved ones taken away forcibly, never to be returned.
Even the numbness the original speaker experiences (“feels” does not seem to quite fit) is a different type. Both cases demonstrate numbness brought about by pain, a coping mechanism of sorts. But in the first case, the pain seems to be new, numbness being a painful escape from feelings that the speaker cannot process—contributing to the disillusionment at the core of the original version. From the newly centered perspective of age, yet another new meaning emerges—a numbness at the familiarity of the pain. “Beneath the stains of time, the feeling disappears.” The years have brought these feelings before—nothing new is happening to the speaker. It is just more of the same sorrow piling on.
The only other reference to other people, “You are someone else. I am still right here,” speaks to the change that accompanies the years of a long life. Here it may be helpful to delve a bit into Johhny Cash’s personal life, as intended or not, it adds another layer to the song’s meaning. Examined through the lens of Cash’s relationship with his wife, who would die just months later, the lyric changes. Biologically, she is not the same, a new person comprised of new cells. She is literally a different person than when they first met, when they first fell in love. Though intuitively he knows that he, too, is not the same person, he conveys the nearly universal feeling that he has not really changed. The best that he can figure, “(he is) still right here.”
Could Cash’s version, then, be a song to June Carter Cash? She fits the bill of “my sweetest friend,” famed for being Cash’s soul mate. Could this cover be Johnny Cash’s attempt at explaining his own life to his wife? “You could have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down. I will make you hurt.” It is not much, in Cash’s eyes, but he offers the meager empire built by his life’s labors to his love. He laments to her the disappointments and mistakes of his life, the pain that such perspective brings in his waning days, the agony inherent in simply being an aged man.
Reznor’s final words represent, for Cash, a distant memory—the possibility of “starting again.” The sheer breadth of Cash’s existence spanning decades, “a million miles away” in his mind, renders this thought nearly overwhelming. The prospect of starting the whole exhausting ordeal again, of rethreading the varied strands of a greatly fragmented life—it is enough to cause despair. And yet, Johnny tells June that he would not take on another, more bearable life. He would do “keep himself.” All of the heartache the song has been decrying thus far? He would do it again. Because, he implies, that difficult life brought him to her, and her to him.
Thus, Cash’s deconstructive act of covering Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” revamps the song, makes it no longer Trent Reznor’s. It becomes about Johhny Cash’s life specifically. And, like all great texts, its specificity lends it universality. By flipping the youth/age binary, decentering the former and instead privileging age, Johhny Cash tells his story, the stories of our grandparents, of war veterans, of the elderly man who frequents the local coffeehouse. He awakens participants of a youth-worshipping culture to the reality of a part of life often ignored, participants who will one day live it.
Works Cited
Cash, Johnny. "Hurt." Rec. 5 Nov. 2002. American IV: Man Comes Around. Johnny Cash. American Recordings, LLC, 2003. MP3.
Deutsch, Robert. "June Carter Cash Lauded at Funeral." Usatoday.com. 19 May 2003. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. <http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-05-18-carter-funeral_x.htm>.
Reznor, Trent. "Hurt." Rec. 8 Mar. 1994. The Downward Spiral. Nine Inch Nails. Interscope Records, 2004. MP3.
Sharples, Kevin. "Johnny Cash, 'Hurt' & Trent Reznor - Stagepass News."Stagepass Music News - On The Web - Stagepassnews.com. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. <http://www.stagepassnews.com/articles/vox/johnnycash_hurt.html>.