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In BlackJohnny Cash's bleak new video.

By Virginia HeffernanPosted Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003, at 11:13 AM ET

Cash, in a dark moodJune Carter Cash appears afraid that her husband is going to upset himself or that he will need his medication. Her eyes are keen and frightened. His are rheumy, so light they look clear. His ridged cheekbones now suggest a stripped skull. His nose has eroded. This is Johnny Cash at 70, in the video for "Hurt" (VH1, MTV2), the dirge by Nine Inch Nails that Cash has brought back to life.

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The song may also have brought Cash back to life. Long in purgatory, Cash has begun to appear in Nashville again. He has opened his doors to cameramen. The video opens on a Greek figure in bronze, possibly Laocoön, whose eyes are rolled back; he looks pious and desolate at the same time. He is part of Cash's household, one jammed with bounty—a broad cornucopia of meat and shellfish on which Cash will pour his wine. And later, Christ will appear, first in a commonplace painting, possibly a Warner Sallman, and then in a flickering re-creation of the Crucifixion, at which a crowd—a crowd from a long-ago Cash concert—cheers as nails are hit.

Related on washingtonpost.com

MSN Entertainment has audio clips of "Hurt" and the rest of American IV: The Man Comes Around, plus links to buy the album.

Related on the Web

If you missed the link above, you can watch the "Hurt" video online.

The voice of sorrows has lasted. At the head of a heavy table, Cash delivers "Hurt" in the voice of a heartbroken patriarch, occasionally gesturing abruptly, as if dismissing ghosts. He appears once convulsed in sobs, and some of what hurts, it seems, is memories ("I remember everything"), though the director, Mark Romanek, can only guess which ones in archival footage. Dancing with June? Cash sings, "I will let you down." Winking at fans? Playing San Quentin? That gold album, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, framed, is smashed, part of the neglected memorabilia at the House of Cash Museum in Hendersonville, Tenn. According to a sign, the House of Cash is now closed to the public.

You may well scoff at Christian kitsch, but be on the lookout for "Hurt"; the video is loosely and beautifully made, and, by running the stark song up against set pieces and still-lifes of trinkets, it manages to make perishing kitsch stand in for end-of-life regrets. The song contains the word "focus"; it contains the word "hole." Cash has "hole" down—it's a country word, his frown hardly splits to say it—but "focus," as in, "I focus on the pain," is a conspicuous trace of the hi-fi songwriter Trent Reznor. In Cash's awkwardness with the word, he shows a hint of loathing for the song, whose theme is self-loathing. Cash plays the song on the guitar, with mounting panic from the piano. Today is his birthday.

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Virginia Heffernan is a television critic for The New York Times. Her book, The Underminer, which she wrote with Mike Albo, comes out in February.

Photograph of Jonhnny Cash by Jeff Christensen/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

There is an excellent discussion about covers after Dilan_Esper's post below. Thanks to trainwreck, Bill-in-Seattle, BigIron and anyone else who drops by.

Remark From The Fray:

The song appears on Nine Inch Nails' most popular album, "The Downward Spiral". It is extremely bleak (as is much of NIN's gothic-industrial music)-- so bleak that it really didn't gain the recognition that the band's two most well-known tracks, "Head Like a Hole" and "Closer", did. (The fact that the song was probably originally about drugs ("the needle tears a hole") didn't help matters.) But it did get its fair share of radio airplay, and it was one of the standout moments from the concerts on the NIN tour in support of that album, because of the intensity of the band's performance.

Now Johnny Cash comes and creates a whole new context for the song. Rather than being about drugs, the song turns into a meditation on aging and how it all slips away as you get older. Musically, the song is stripped down; none of NIN's layered sythesizers, distorted guitars, and screaming vocals; just Cash's beautiful voice with acoustic guitar and piano accompanyment. And the gorgeous, haunting video, showing the souvenirs of an American icon, collected over more than 40 years, covered with shattered glass, cobwebs, and dust.

This is the reinvention of good material by a great singer, the sort of thing that Frank Sinatra did all the time in his prime, and that Joe Cocker was able to do to a certain extent in the late 1960's, but that we so rarely see in the modern era of prefabricated music. How ironic that it is not only Cash's momentos that sit dormant; also dormant is the great pop tradition of making a song one's own that he exemplifies in this wonderful record.

-- Dilan_Esper

(To reply, click here.)

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