The Night Nine Inch Nails Played Dance Party USA

A band that would spend the next decade making some of the bleakest music in American rock spent three minutes on a teen dance show in Philadelphia, pretending to play a song about hitting the ground. The tape sat unseen for more than twenty years. When it finally surfaced, the singer explained that the whole thing had started as a joke nobody expected anyone to take seriously.

Nine Inch Nails performed their debut single "Down In It" on Dance Party USA in late 1989, lip-syncing on the show's Philadelphia set while teenagers danced around them. Trent Reznor later said the band named the show as the most absurd booking they could think of, then found out the booking was real. The footage was considered lost until a first-generation tape surfaced online in 2012 and went viral.

What the tape shows

The surviving footage runs about three minutes. Nine Inch Nails are set up in front of the Dance Party USA logo, a glittering block-letter sign, under a bank of stage lights, with the show's dancers on the floor around them. Reznor is in a sleeveless shirt with his hair tied back, working the small stage hard. The band mimes the performance: guitar, drums, and keyboards are all present and none of them are producing the audio, which is the studio recording of "Down In It." A host's voice closes the introduction over the opening bars with the line "Nine Inch Nails with Down In It."

The copy that survives is not a home recording off the television. It carries burned-in SMPTE timecode running in the corner of the frame and a production reel slate, and it circulates today under the watermark of a commercial footage library. It is a studio dub, which is most of the reason it exists at all.

Why Dance Party USA booked a band like this

Dance Party USA ran daily on the USA Network from April 12, 1986, to June 27, 1992, produced by Frank and Michael Nise through Nise Productions, shot at WPHL-TV and WGBS in Philadelphia with the production operation based in Camden, New Jersey. The format ran on guests: acts came in, performed to their own record in front of a floor full of local teenagers, and left. Booking a new act on a small label was routine, and in the autumn of 1989 Nine Inch Nails were exactly that. Their debut album Pretty Hate Machine had been released by TVT Records on October 20, 1989, and "Down In It" was the single being pushed.

By that point the show had reached the hosting era of Bobby Catalano and Heather "Princess" Day, the pairing that ran from 1989 through 1991. Philadelphia magazine, reporting on the show in 2016, identified Day as Princess as the host who introduced Nine Inch Nails.

Reznor's own account puts the trip in New Jersey, which matches where the Nises ran the production.

Reznor's account of the booking

When the footage resurfaced in 2012, Reznor posted his version of how it happened. Pitchfork published it in full on March 28, 2012:

"Many years ago, a young and naive Nine Inch Nails were asked what TV shows they'd be interested in appearing on. As a joke (and likely drunk), they thought of the most absurd choice they could come up with at the time. They were then informed their bluff had been called and were actually booked on said show... They hopped in their Honda Civic touring vehicle (hatchback) and travelled many miles to (I think) NJ for the big show. They had a laugh making fun of the people, their fashion choices and hairstyles. Life was good. Years later, the internet is discovered... There's a moral in there somewhere. Come to think of it, Skrillex may indeed owe me some publishing on that hairdo..."

That is the whole story from the band's side, and it is worth noting what it does not contain: any suggestion that the appearance was a career moment, and any date.

How the clip came back

The performance was effectively invisible for over two decades. It returned through collectors rather than through the band or the show. Pitchfork reported that the footage was posted to the Echoing the Sound message board, surfaced via the NIN Hotline, and came from a first-generation video recording that someone had purchased for $100. Within a day it was on Pitchfork, Slicing Up Eyeballs, and Synthtopia, and from there it spread.

The clip's later history runs into the fight over who owns this material. Philadelphia magazine's April 2016 report documented former Dance Party USA and Dancin' On Air regulars having their uploaded clips removed under copyright claims from Omni 2000, the company headed by producer Michael Nise. The video that Philadelphia magazine itself embedded in that article is now gone from YouTube, removed following a copyright removal request from Omni 2000.

How the telling has grown

• Late 1989. The performance is taped and airs. It attracts no documented press at the time.
• March 28, 2012. The footage is posted to the Echoing the Sound message board from a first-generation tape. Pitchfork's Carrie Battan writes it up the same day, describing it as coming from "the cheesy late-1980s/early-1990s live dance program." Slicing Up Eyeballs covers it the same day and dates the clip "presumably from late 1989 or early 1990."
• March 28, 2012. Reznor responds on Twitter with the joke-booking account, quoted above. This is the only substantive telling from anyone who was there.
• April 10, 2016. Philadelphia magazine's report on the feud between the shows' regulars and their producer names Nine Inch Nails among the acts the shows featured, and identifies Princess as the host who introduced them.
• Since. The clip recirculates constantly, and the date drifts with it.

On the drift: the exact air date is the weakest point in the record. The archive tape and an episode listing both carry November 20, 1989. The 2012 coverage that broke the story would not commit past "late 1989 or early 1990," and later reposts have labelled it 1990. What every source agrees on is the window: this was the promotional run for a single released in 1989, and Reznor's own telling places it early enough in the band's life that they were still touring in a Honda Civic hatchback.

The honest bottom line

This is a novelty clip, and treating it as anything more oversells it. Nine Inch Nails did not break on Dance Party USA, the show did not discover them, and by Reznor's own account the band turned up to laugh at the place. The performance is not even a performance in the strict sense, since the audio is the record. What makes it worth keeping is the collision: a booking desk doing an ordinary day's work, a band taking a joke too far and having to honor it, and a format so committed to its own routine that it put an industrial rock group on the same floor it gave to freestyle acts and lip-sync contests. That is a real picture of what daily dance television actually was in 1989, and it survives only because somebody kept a tape.

Frequently asked

Sources

• Carrie Battan, "Watch Rare, Amazing Footage of Nine Inch Nails Performing on 'Dance Party USA' in the Late 1980s," Pitchfork, March 28, 2012. Carries Trent Reznor's full statement and the account of how the tape surfaced.
• "Vintage Video: Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor lip syncs 'Down In It' on 'Dance Party USA'," Slicing Up Eyeballs, March 28, 2012.
• Victor Fiorillo, "Facebook Flame Wars, Legal Action, and 'Death Threats': Dancin' on Air's Family Feud Boils Over," Philadelphia magazine, April 10, 2016.
• Archival records for Dance Party USA (USA Network run dates, production companies, studios, host years) and for Pretty Hate Machine and "Down In It" (label and release date).
• The surviving performance footage itself, for what is on screen and what the host says.

Read about Dance Party USA in 1989 · Back to the Dance Party USA archive