Flesh & Bones : 19991111
I was just reading a cooking book today.
It featured steak and I saw more than enough pictures of huge blocks and slices of meat: very big chunks of meat that revealed bones and halves of cows hanging on hooks. Their color of red was extremely beautiful and when meat got ripe, its color became deepen and embodied its incredible energy. Ivory as the color of fat and yellow or brown as that of broiled meat even suggested the sweet smell. To be honest, I have to admit they tempted my appetite. I feel like it’s kind of cruel…yet, in that article where they are treated as foodstuff, such an image is swept off.
I just saw it with with my own eyes that having a meal means taking lives. Yes, I sensed the existence of lives still lingering in those chunks of meat.
Next morning my darling, who read the magazine with me the day before, told me.
“The cover of ‘The Fragile’ reminds me of flesh and bones we saw in the magazine yesterday”. ….It sure does. “And the logo of NIN is on the left, so it seems as if it should be the ‘heart’”.
You call it soul, or rather heart. Yes, heart. That’s it.
Does he mean that “NIN” is his heart or his soul? It’s very convincing.
Skinned raw meat. Weight of moisture called body fluid. Presence of lives hiding inside them. All of these are pretty appropriate visual images for this album: Visual images that reveal raw color and heat.
Red and white, which fundamentally conflict with each other, imply presence of “lives”. That is, here are also “a pair of opposites” I mentioned before.
And the image of “wearing flesh (body)” as the package adds an extremely great meaning to this album . It’s like there is him who is more real, substantial and life-size.
From the beginning when I started to listen to this album, I’ve always been using the expression of “as if touching lives” as my impression. Whenever I listen to it, I feel his presence, or his energy and heat. The interpretation of “flesh and bones” fits this impression of mine so well that I feel like I’ve got another key solving the “mystery”.
Trent said himself about this album, “I managed not to reach any specific conclusion”, so all the art work also follows that concept, I suppose. Therefore, this “flesh and bones” is only one of interpretations. If you view it from a different angle, it may look differently.
This interpretation of today is the first one.
