Who Is The Girl In The Closer Music Video Nine Inch Nails

I Was Bullied for Being Arab. Nine Inch Nails Threw Me a Lifeline.

As a teenage girl paralyzed with fright, 1 of the darkest albums of the 1990s, "The Downward Screw," gave me the guts to insubordinate against my tormentors.

Credit... Farah Al Qasimi for The New York Times

Sept. 24, 2020

During my showtime calendar week of school in Kentucky, in 5th class, at the very beginning of the first Gulf State of war, a boy drew a movie and hung it on the classroom wall. On one side was an illustration of me; on the other, the balance of my classmates and instructor. Above my head, in marker, the words "Saddam Salam." The instructor came in, examined it, peeled information technology off and never said a thing. I've since joked that I was the "literal poster child for bullying," only it's not so funny.

In that boondocks, a tight-knit community in the Bible Chugalug, my Arabness and my Muslim groundwork were glaring targets. I was terrorized ruthlessly, past those looking to elevate their station or find the butt of a joke, including the occasional instructor. For stretches over the next few years, throughout centre school, I would sit in a classroom during lunch or in the front office during recess, for my safe.

Hometown pride is everything in a town like that, and it was made exceedingly articulate that this was non my hometown. Which, of course, it wasn't.

I spent my first four years in Beirut, Lebanon, during one of the worst eras of its civil war. The pandemonium of bombs detonating was the soundtrack of my formative years. (Memories that surged back to the surface with the smash in Beirut last month.) My parents, with fiddling selection but to chase down a better life, moved with their three daughters to the United states of america, landing in Colorado and Missouri for a few years before Kentucky.

Like so many immigrant children, I didn't belong — hither, there or anywhere. And I was cornered between two cultures past an unspoken guiding principle: Don't stand out, but don't fit in. And so I was a ghost, spending virtually of my time lonely deep in my hobbies, including watching absurd amounts of Tv set. My parents, coping with their new reality and skeptical of American babyhood rituals similar sleepovers, were largely hands-off equally long as I stayed at home.

Then in 1994, days earlier my 14th birthday, the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer" premiered on MTV: A macabre fever dream crawling with insects and gritty with cobwebs. There was a wired center thumping, a sus scrofa head spinning, a monkey on a cross and the skull of a balderdash. And a singer, Trent Reznor, sometimes blindfolded, levitating or writhing as a panel of similarly suited businessmen cast a judgmental eye. It was a far weep from the bromidic videos peddled to adolescent girls, a battery of spinning, polished Jordans and Joeys that had long left me confused and a little repulsed.

On my altogether (which I share with Reznor, I'd afterwards learn), I went to the mall and slid cash across the counter for "The Downward Screw," the album with "Closer," which had been released a couple months prior. At dwelling house, I slipped the CD in my Discman, hid the case under my mattress and listened to it on headphones until my ears were trashed.

The music — a kind of mechanical cacophony I'd never heard before — landed in my life with no context, a shooting star from the heaven. Merely instead of it creating a crater in my life, it slipped perfectly into the one already there.

On the surface, a bleak concept album most a man spiraling toward suicide, packed with explicitly sexual and violent lyrics — even if it's regarded as ane of the greatest albums of all time — might seem like an unlikely, even dangerous, salve for a pitiful daughter paralyzed with feet. But instead, information technology threw me a line. Its themes of religious alienation, loss, loneliness, fear, acrimony and maybe most important, NIN'southward signature theme, control — which I was desperate for — resonated deeply. To break complimentary, I had to see my pain reflected and swim across that dark puddle. That grinding, banging, cranking scream of industrial sounds transformed my shame to rage.

"At that place are others," I realized. My people: outcasts, nerds, misfits, loners. And with that, my rebellion was underway. I began slowly shape-shifting from a ghost to a flesh-and-blood human. My choices, fifty-fifty the risky ones, were, for the showtime fourth dimension in my life, mine.

We're taught that risk-taking, thrill-seeking and fearlessness are the domain of boys and men. And that girls are flowers — precious, vulnerable and evanescent, to exist protected from perceived forces of destruction. To me at 14, dark industrial music that flouted boundaries was the apotheosis of courage and the antithesis of fear. Possibly that was role of the point: This music, and the identity that went along with information technology, was non intended for me (or so I thought), which only made me want information technology more. I guess I'k more than of a weed, resilient and determined to progress, similar and then many girls and women.

"The Downward Spiral" gave me the nerve to fight for what'due south mine, and with my newfound armor, I began high school transformed, inside and out, to the point that some of my classmates didn't recognize me. I inscribed the letters "nin" on my backpack in Wite-Out — an adventurous signal in that conservative community, where such music was considered devilish. The bullying stopped almost on a dime, and I felt what was once unthinkable: cool.

By going public with my fandom — in the fourth dimension simply before the cyberspace allowed united states to find our tribes with relative ease — the other others came into view. I wasn't so alone after all. I became aware that tucked into corners all around me, in that very school and boondocks, were artistic kids similarly struggling. These newfound connections opened upward new worlds of sounds, messages and musicians that would further mold me: Fiona Apple, Rage Against the Machine, Garbage, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Nirvana, Ani DiFranco and my favorite of all, Tori Amos. These artists would provide the score every bit I carved an atypical path through my 20s. The decade culminated in me coming out as gay.

Today, when I stream "The Downwards Spiral," every palpitation-inducing thwack, growl and whisper is branded in my retention. And I'one thousand reminded that for those like me, the status quo is a delusion, elusive no matter how hard we hunt it. By existing as an Arab in America and a gay person, I am inherently an outsider. But outside, as it turns out, is good. And recently, as we all navigate this new era of transformation and bid farewell to a norm that was unwelcoming to many, maybe it's dandy.

Us rebels, well-suited to adapt, get to proceed imagining reality on our terms and, like a weed that will flourish anywhere, take our opportunities and claim space in any way we want.