I know that for a lot of people, Prick isn’t much more than the random product of the clout Trent Reznor carried at Interscope in the 90s; a favour extended to former bandmate, friend, and mentor Kevin McMahon. You might hear “Animal” out at a more retro-minded industrial club night now and again, but the first Prick album just isn’t discussed that much, and second LP The Wreckard, released seven years later, is almost entirely unknown. But Prick was an integral part of my initiation into industrial music. I have innumerable memories of and associations with “Communiqué”, “No Fair Fights”, and “Makebelieve”, many of which are deeply personal and not of any interest to anyone else, but I think the way in which the record blended ’90s industrial production and rock structures is worth discussing.
Whether I was conscious of it at the time or not, part of what drew me to Prick was how it framed industrial rock as being part of, or at least clearly connected with, extant rock traditions and markers in the broadest sense. As opposed to, say, Skinny Puppy, one of my other recent discoveries and obsessions circa ’96-’98, Kevin McMahon’s music didn’t sound wholly separate from the music I’d heard on the radio all my life…and yet it was still undeniably different from the glam rock and new wave it drew inspiration from (two other genres I was also busy exploring at the time). Unlike industrial metal, itself a hybrid of two “extreme” genres, Prick wears its debt to the smoother (if no less alienated, perhaps) sounds of Bowie and Bolan on its sleeve. In a way, that made Prick a weirder listen than Last Rights, which I understood the place of only by virtue of its complete opposition to music itself as I then understood the term. I didn’t know where Prick fit in in the topos of music, and thus it puzzled and beguiled me.
Two decades on, I realise that by straddling two worlds, Prick was forcing me to pay attention to core compositional structures rather than the production and engineering techniques with which I was, and still am, enchanted (I can’t overstate how much of my taste was formed by Flood and Alan Moulder at a young age). After a few years with Prick I could listen to Pretty Hate Machine and notice just how much it owed to pop songcraft. That seems painfully obvious now, but it would have been blasphemy to my sixteen year-old self, decked out in ripped fishnets and chipped nailpolish. The reasons why Reznor cited Prince as an influence were now plain as day. From: https://www.idieyoudie.com/2015/01/22/in-conversation-prick/
