TIME'S 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL AMERICANS

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Reznor, 31, records as Nine Inch Nails, a one-man studio act, and has a thriving touring career as leader of Nine Inch Nails, a quartet that interprets his computerized compositions before wild fans. He is now nurturing other shock rockers, such as the hard-core horror band Marilyn Manson. Reznor's work is the stuff of nightmares for virtuecrats like William Bennett, but Oliver Stone drafted Reznor to write music for Natural Born Killers, as did David Lynch for his post-noir Lost Highway. Reznor also provides the background music for Goths, a mostly Generation Y subculture of kids who tend to dress in black, vampirelike garb and obsess over death and decay.

Reznor's music is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex, suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy. But to the depressed, his music, veering away from the heartless core of Industrial, proffers pop's perpetual message of hope--or therapeutic Schadenfreude: there is worse pain in the world than yours. It is a lesson as old as Robert Johnson's blues. Reznor wields the muscular power of Industrial rock not with frat-boy swagger but with a brooding, self-deprecating intelligence. "I had no expectations of commercial success," he says. "But people 'got it.' That I didn't expect."

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