Johnny Cash's "Hurt" is a bad song. Maybe even elder abuse!

Cash was manipulated into covering a song he didn’t even like and now it’s seen as his definitive statement.

Cash’s hurt is great. I think it’s a terrific bit in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

When Darl loosens the rope Cash begins to sweat again. His teeth look out. “Hurt?” Darl says.

Darl continues to pester Cash about whether or not he’s hurt. Cash obviously is hurt, he has a broken fucking leg, an injury that has led to him, in darkly-comic fashion, having to ride his mother’s own coffin that he built himself, but his pride won’t allow him to suggest otherwise.

Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” on the other hand, is pretty bad.

I hate a lot of the American Recordings. I’m not opposed to the idea of giving Johnny Cash a country rock spin, and I think The Heartbreakers were a great fit as a backing band on the second instalment, but the production is just so fucking asinine, and a lot of the creative decisions amount to gimmicky bullshit. The alt-rock cheesy “bigness” of the whole thing feels distinctly un-Cash-like, the sort of timely, pandering nonsense that convinces me that, had Rubin dug him up in the 80s, the drums would have been given a fat gated reverb to boot. It feels shameless in the way McKinsey’s attempts to turn vicious psychopaths like Mohammed bin Salman into cuddly progressive heartthrobs feel shameless.

“Hurt” was a bad fit for Cash, perhaps because Cash generally made good music and “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails is not in that category. Trent Reznor is, of course, one of the most insipid lyricists in the rock canon, second only to the guy from Three Days Grace (although Three Days Grace is distinctly not in the rock canon) in his ability to make being addicted to heroin sound like the whiniest pussydom imaginable. Reznor’s cringe-inducing vocals make nearly his entire catalog borderline unlistenable, and his output works best when he has no opportunity to write words to it, like his scores with Atticus Ross, or his production work (Saul Williams’ peerless Niggy Tardust comes to mind). Cash does his best with what he’s given, such as changing the lyric “crown of shit”—a line I can’t imagine went over well with the devout Cash—to “crown of thorns,” and lending as much pathos as he can to the whole affair. Like most of the covers recorded during these sessions (U2! Soundgarden! Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds!), it feels like a terrible gimmick, the sort of shit just made to generate Rolling Stone listicles about which one is “the coolest.”

Would Cash ever have considered recording his cover of “Hurt” had he listened to other Nine Inch Nails songs like “Heathen,” where Reznor sings such juvenile lyrics as “God is dead / and no one cares / if there is a hell / I’ll see you there”? Having the religious Cash sing “Personal Jesus” and “Losing My Religion” were further bad-taste bullshit moves, as was putting Alice Cooper on the aforementioned Depeche Mode cover, someone who later revealed he’d never even met Johnny Cash and I’m not even sure Cash knew he was even on the track to begin with. Many of the other guests are a big pandering joke too—Joe Strummer? John Frusciante? Fiona Apple? Fucking Danzig? Can you imagine Johnny Cash listening to a song like “Last Caress”? You could try to make the case that something like “Last Caress” is merely the logical endpoint of the sort of country antihero songs Cash and the clique to which he belonged were known for, and if you were about to, congratulations! You are officially Bad Faith Ponce of the Year! And fuck man, I haven’t gotten to that fucking retarded music video for “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” that features such luminaries as Kate Moss, Kanye West, Chris Martin, Travis Barker, Bono, Owen Wilson, Anthony Kiedis, Terrence Howard, Kid Rock, Jay-Z, and fucking AMY LEE OF EVANESCENCE. Oh yes, and of course it features Rick Rubin. Which makes a great segue.

Much of the problem with these sessions is they have next to nothing to do with Johnny Cash and everything to do with his producer for the sessions, Rick Rubin. Everything about the sessions is covered with Rubin’s worst instincts, which is especially disgusting considering Rubin sold the whole project to Cash as just “him and his guitar” while Rubin would merely “hit record.” Cash didn’t choose Rubin. Cash didn’t even know who Rick Rubin was. Rubin approached Cash and Cash was desperate. Far from the reputation he sometimes has for being very accommodating and even therapist-like, seen especially during his admittedly excellent interviews, Rick Rubin can be, at times, a complete control freak. It's why the Beastie Boys hated working with him—he wanted to be their Malcolm McLaren, maybe more appropriately their Lou Pearlman, and be the man pulling all the strings, keeping the band in his shadow as his personal pet project, even graciously taking credit for the Beastie’s own personal efforts. Tim Carr, interviewed by Dan LeRoy in his book on Paul’s Boutique, recalls the odious perception that “the Beastie Boys [were] really Rick Rubin… everyone felt he wrote their music and he created their persona.” A bitter Rubin even tried to sabotage the band’s efforts when they left his label, with Adam Yauch describing him as “trying to throw a monkey wrench” into their post-Def-Jam lives. Johnny Cash was no longer the defiant young man he once was. Handed an ailing old man in a career slump who had been abandoned by the major labels and literally just got out of rehab, it’s clear Rubin had found someone pliable enough that he could exploit for his own vision.

It should be painfully obvious that the song was not Johnny Cash’s idea. In his final interview with Kurt Loder, although Cash has a lot of positive things to say about shooting the music video for the song—an undeniably brilliant music video mind you that absolutely stands out as the song’s most redeeming aspect—what he has to say on the song itself is a different matter:

LODER: Where did the song come from; did Rick Rubin play it for you and say, “We’re gonna do this song?”

CASH: Yeah.

LODER: What did you think when you first heard it?

CASH: Yeah, Rick played the song for me, and I uh [pause] when I heard the record, I said, “I can’t do that song, it’s not my style. It just—” He said, “Well let’s try it another way; let me do something.” So he put down a track and I listened to it, so we started working on that—from there we started working until we got the record made.

So the idea was Rubin’s, the arrangement was Rubin’s—quite frankly, even being interviewed by Loder stinks of the influence of Rick Rubin. The whole ordeal starts to feel like elder abuse. Later in the interview, Cash goes on to talk highly of “Hurt” again—the video, that is. He never once says a positive thing about the song itself. Elsewhere Cash told Time that he had told Rubin that Reznor’s original was “the best anti-drug song I ever heard, but I [didn’t] think [it was] for me,” which sounds less like praise to me than it does an old man trying, sheepishly and politely, to distance himself from a proposed idea without seeming “out-of-touch” or “closed-minded.” In that same interview he suggests that his own work may transcend the genre of country entirely, maybe even reach into rock music, a pretty absurd statement that feels like a sentiment Rubin beat into the very vulnerable Man in Black.

This wasn’t even the first time Cash had fallen victim to a megalomaniacal strongman either; right-wing psychopath and celebrity preacher Billy Graham had his claws in the man years earlier and manipulated him for even more sinister ends, like he’d likewise done with other vulnerable celebrities such as Bettie Page, using Cash, the progressive-minded advocate for Indigenous rights, as a pawn in his political machinations. Like with Rubin, this resulted in very un-Cash-like behaviour, such as the singer of such anti-war songs as “Singin’ in Viet Nam Talkin’ Blues” meeting with Richard Nixon at Graham’s behest, a meeting which included the humiliating request on Nixon’s part that Cash play “Okie from Muskogee” and “Welfare Cadillac,” neither of them by Cash himself, and a request Cash later described in his autobiography as having made him uncomfortable in part due to the songs’ “anti-hippie” and “anti-black” messages respectively.

A much better version of Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” does exist, however. Nearing the end of his own life, Cash’s friend Waylon Jennings recorded the song “Outlaw Shit,” for my money one of the most powerful songs ever put to tape. The parallels are striking: both men were aligned with the Outlaw Country movement, both men struggled with addiction, both men were crippled by life-threatening diabetes, and here both men wound up recording heartfelt renditions of earlier songs to, in adapting them, comment on their own present brokenness. The difference, however, is that the song Jennings is “covering” is his own track, his 1978 song “Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out of Hand.” What was originally recorded as a sort of death knell for the Outlaw Country movement becomes a death knell for Jennings himself, sliding as he was inevitably into oblivion, and just short of having to have his leg amputated. The bitter humour of the original is stripped away, revealing a broken old man who sounds like shit. Lines like “I’m for law and order, the way that it should be / This song’s about the night they spent protecting you from me,” delivered the first time around with comical irony, now sound like they’re filled with hurt—Jennings sounds like being forced to reflect on the person he had become, a glamorous “outlaw,” had actually come to ruin his life and pushed him to the margins of polite society, and made him deeply ashamed of himself, forcing him to ask when it was that he become someone that people had to be “protected” from. “Got me for possession / For something that was long gone,” originally referring to the flushing of Jenning’s cocaine during the drug bust, suddenly takes on an ironic meaning as a suggestion that the drug abuse of his past, though he had since gotten clean (it was “long gone”), was now killing him; the police of the song now become parallel with death, and “The Man” becomes more than just the Fed, but possibly God Himself; self-eulogizing, Jennings’ song feels imbued with the ghosts of his friends who went before him. Townes Van Zandt, victim of his own rampant alcoholism; Blaze Foley, gunned down like the sort of cowboy they’d all once paid homage to. It was even recorded and released before “Hurt” was ever a glimmer in Rubin’s green eyes, and it’s everything that Johnny Cash’s farewell should have been.

One Cash wouldn’t tell Darl he was “hurt” when he really was. The other Cash was “hurt” too, and possibly more “hurt” than Faulkner’s; Cash was a recovering addict, he was dying of diabetes, he had gone functionally blind. He deserved a song that brought that pain to life as he rode his own coffin into the grave. Instead he got “Hurt,” and we all got burned.