Hurt
by Nine Inch Nails
- 79
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 49
- Danceability
- 71
- Acousticness
Trent Reznor wrote "Hurt" as the closing song of Nine Inch Nails' 1994 album The Downward Spiral. It went to radio on April 17, 1995, as a promotional single, and the next year it was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. The song includes references to self-harm and heroin addiction, but its overall meaning is disputed. Some listeners hear a suicide note, while others hear a struggle to find a reason to live.
The original video was a live performance recorded before the show in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 13, 1995. A scrim dropped in front of the band carried projected images, among them war atrocities, a nuclear bomb test, survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad and a fox decomposing in reverse, while a spotlight let Reznor be seen through them.
Later in 1995, when the American industrial rock band opened for David Bowie on his Outside Tour, Bowie sang the song in a duet with Reznor. During the Fragility Tour, the progression was played on acoustic guitar by Robin Finck instead of on piano. Johnny Cash covered it in 2002, and Reznor said that song was not his anymore.
Hurt runs at 79 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.04 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 759 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.