Eraser

The entire album (The Downward Spiral) is about a man's battle with his cold, emotionless "machine" half of himself, and it peaks in this song. In the intro, the drums represent the human half of the narrator, who has previously been shown to repeat phrases ("nothing can stop me now", "I wanna know everything", etc.) as a coping mechanism in the face of danger. Likewise, the drums loop endlessly in the face of an assault of guitar static, a noise which represents his machine half, as seen at the very end of "Hurt" and most of the album from "The Becoming" onwards. Then the lyrics start. The first set is clearly his machine half talking, based on the lack of emotion and calmness of the voice. The narrator's human half, meanwhile, stays trapped in the background in the form of a drum loop, helplessly listening as his machine half describes all his relationships. "Need you Dream you" For the narrator, relationships are necessary for him to assert his dominance over someone else. When his previous girlfriend left in "Piggy", he was devastated - not because he missed her, but because he missed the feeling of control. His human half might downplay this need, but his mechanical side has no problem exposing it for what it is. "Find you Taste you" To fill his need for dominance, the narrator finds someone to lord over and gets to know them ("tastes" them). "Fuck you Use you" Pretty self-explanatory, although the "fuck you" could be either a literal fucking or just the exclamation (i.e. "fuck off"). "Scar you Break you" Having used the "piggy" for his own ends, the narrator throws them away like trash and starts the cycle again. Then the narrator's human half breaks through. It's listened to the machine half, can see the circle (or downward spiral) he's created, and he wants to end it. The screeching wall of sound made by the guitars is the mechanical half trying to push him back as he shouts out his message of self-realization. "Lose me!" Two important shifts occur here. One, the voice has emotion - more emotion than I've ever heard on any other song. And two, the perspective changes. No longer is the narrator commanding himself to abuse the "piggy". He's commanding the "piggy" to abuse him. Specifically, he wants to be lost, forgotten, and left alone where he can't hurt anyone but himself. "Hate me!" The narrator sees what he's done to his girlfriends, and he hates himself for it. He can see that it's far too late to atone for his sins, though. Much more drastic measures are necessary. "Smash me!" The narrator is getting more and more desperate. As the guitars grow louder, his pleas go from wishes to be left alone to orders to be killed. "Erase me!" He can see that death is too good for him. What he needs is to be erased - wiped away without a trace that he ever existed. Only then can he undo all the pain he has caused. Obviously, though, that isn't possible, so he settles for the next-best thing. "Kill me!" And so it comes to this. As the wall of guitars close in on him, the narrator's humanity screams its increasingly distorted protest in the only way it knows how - a cry for someone to end him. It's worth noting that even though the narrator sees that death is the only way out of his situation, he's not yet ready to pull the trigger himself. All in all, one of the rawest, most emotional pieces I have ever heard. Somehow, this song makes me cry every time, even more so than Hurt.