Closer Lyrics

"Closer" (also known as Halo 9) is a song written by Trent Reznor and featured on the 1994 Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral. In mid-1994, the song was released as the second single from the album. Most versions of the single are titled "Closer" to God," a rare example in music of a single's title differing from the title of its A-Side. ("Closer to God" is also the title of an alternate version of "Closer" featured on the single.) This single is numbered as Halo Nine under Nine Inch Nails' system of Halo numbers. In spite of the blunt and profane sexual content contained in the song's lyrics, (the chorus infamously begins with the couplet "I wanna fuck you like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside") "Closer" became Nine Inch Nails' biggest hit up to that time, cemented Reznor's status as an industrial rock superstar, and remains arguably his best-known song. Heavily censored versions of the song and its equally explicit and controversial music video (directed by Mark Romanek) received substantial airplay on radio and MTV. "Closer"'s drum track features a heavily modified bass drum sample from the Iggy Pop song "Nightclubbing" from his album The Idiot. Radio edits of "Closer" were created by muting the vocal track for the duration of each deleted obscenity, an early prominent example of this now-common censorship technique. This technique is considered less distracting than the earlier common censorship method, overlaying an electronic tone or "bleep" over each instance of profanity. The song was one of the first to feature censored profanity this prominently and still become a hit. In 2003, VH1 ranked the song at number 93 in its countdown of the "100 Greatest Songs Of The Past 25 Years." The song was ranked at the number 2 position on AOL's "69 Sexiest Songs of All Time," mostly due to the explicit frankness of its chorus. In July 2009, the song was voted in at number 62 on Triple J's Hottest 100 of all time, Australia's largest music poll.