The year was 1994. Trent Reznor was 29 years old, and his industrial rock band, Nine Inch Nails, was completing work on its paradoxically-named second studio album, The Downward Spiral. The band had already seen substantial success: their first studio album Pretty Hate Machine (1989) went triple platinum, and their EP Broken (1992) went platinum as well. NIN t-shirts were ubiquitous in high school hallways, as some of us are old enough to remember.
The final cut on The Downward Spiral, “Hurt,” written by Reznor, was released in early 1995 as a promotional single in advance of the full album. The song charted at #8, and judging from the album’s 3.7 million sales, “Hurt” did its job. “Hurt” would also garner Reznor a nomination for best rock song at the 1996 Grammys. (Nor did the song lose its appeal with age; by 2020, NIN had 9 studio albums and 3 EPs out, and Billboard ranked “Hurt” #3 on its list of NIN’s all-time best songs.)
By the numbers, Reznor was on an upward spiral, but the song itself tells a radically different story. Watch the live performance, listen closely to the music, with its intermittent nail-on-the-chalkboard theme, and note the imagery that Reznor chose to show his audience to go along with the lyrics. How does that hit you?
Hold that thought.
Fast-forward to the early 2000s. Producer Rick Rubin is working with an aging Johnny Cash, and–not without some difficulty–convinces Cash to cover “Hurt.” Cash’s cover will come out in 2002, the year before he dies. Watch the music video to see what Cash made of it.
Rubin’s own account of making the song shows that he understands the overwhelming gravitas of Cash singing Reznor’s lyric. It is, as Rubin says, a far more powerful gut-punch coming from an old man than from a guy in his twenties, with decades still ahead of him.
But Rubin (at least in that interview) misses the note of redemption Cash brings to the song. By changing a single word in the lyric–Reznor’s “I wear this crown of shit/upon my liar’s chair” becomes “I wear this crown of thorns/upon my liar’s chair”–Cash turns the entire song inside out. The iconography of the video adds to the effect, but it’s already there in that single change in wording. Reznor’s wording is an evocative and powerful image of pointlessness, shame, and waste. He chooses from a wide range of disturbing video imagery to depict a world gone mad, and its none-too-subtle effect is to redirect moral responsibility for his own madness. In such a world, is it any wonder that his life is a complete train wreck?
Cash’s “crown of thorns” wording evokes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ–and the crucifixion is never the end of the story. The iconography of loss, waste, and regret in Cash’s video–unlike Reznor’s, drawn overwhelmingly from his own life–is deeply real. He isn’t pulling any punches here. But if an aging Cash wears his regret like a crown of thorns, reinforced by a few well-chosen video images of Jesus’ crucifixion, then there’s a resurrection coming. As one commentator (I forget who) put it, Reznor wrote a suicide note, and Cash turned it into a hymn.
Reznor’s response? “That song isn’t mine anymore.”
He’s right. Cash didn’t just cover the song; he baptized it, and by the power of Jesus Christ, what was dead is now raised to a new life.
And that’s how “despoiling the Egyptians” is done.
Full Contact Christianity 
Wow, just wow. I’ve seen Johnny’s cover quite a few times. Praise GOD for Jesus is all I can say. How I thank and need Him every hour……