Next to Nine Inch Nails, Lil Wayne was the biggest draw Saturday and generated the most excitement. That didn’t make him punctual; in fact, his DJ was 10 minutes late for the stage, then he spun a 15-minute set that ranged from “Party Like a Rock Star” to “Wild Thing” to “Free Falling,” leaning heavily on ’90s pop hip-hop. Was this simply crowd-pleasing DJ’ing, or a subtle comment on the audience? I have a hard time imagining him getting a party hype for traditional hip-hop audiences with “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Ice, Ice Baby.” 

When he came out playing “Mr. Carter,” the crowd treated him like the rock star he is. Backed by a live band and a DJ, the songs had the impact hip-hop often lacks live, and a lot of the teens and twentysomethings in attendance rapped along. The cad/lover they wanted or wanted to be is in his rhymes. If anything, he spent a little long indulging his soul man side, and the show slowed to an unmemorable midtempo for 15 or so minutes, when attention flagged after “Lollipop.” He then hustled through shortened versions of songs including “Phone Home,” “Misunderstood” and “Shoot Me Down” - a hip-hop tradition these days, but not a good one. That revved the energy back up and saw the return of rap hands to the audience for the finale, “A Mili.” He, guest Mack Maine and a child I assume is a little Carter took the song as a physical freak-out, dancing and running the width of the stage, Weezy often struggling with his shorts, which were showing off a lot of his blue boxers by the end. When that ended almost 15 minutes past his scheduled stop time, the PA was cut off during what looked like band introductions. Still, we could hear from the stage the DJ spin Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

Lil Wayne was cut so Thievery Corporation could start, and he didn’t look to happy when their first notes boomed over whatever he was saying into a dead mic. The issues I have with the band on Radio Retaliation remain - the heart of Thievery Corp were the most minor presences onstage, and the show felt more like a revue than a band. Still, live it was so much more physical - particularly playing dancehall and reggae - that it was a dance party, and name aside, they’d be a hit at Jazz Fest. Unfortunately, they one-upped Lil Wayne by taking the 15 minutes of their set that he cut into and going an extra 10 minutes for good measure.

I was curious about the Mars Volta, and I wanted to like a band with some of the style of a young Wayne Kramer and Rob Tyner at their core, but the lengthy pieces - not jams; this was organized music in its way - resulted in a lot of intensity without movement or significant change. In theory, I approve of their indulgence, stretching ideas beyond the boundaries of conventional sense, droning to let psychedelic moments happen. But for the most part, they didn’t. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala was physically feeling the music and danced with an impressive recklessness onstage, but in the end, it was just a lot jumping around that didn’t create drama or excitement.    

The most interesting thing about the Nine Inch Nails show was a curious sense of - well, “contentment” is probably not the right word, but something like it. Angst is still central to Trent Reznor’s music, and he’s still tightly wound, hunched in a semi-fetal position over the microphone, but he doesn’t perform like this could all go away tomorrow. He rearranged “Closer” to something slinkier, something less bombastic than it once was, and he slowed the set for a suite of instrumental tracks from Ghosts I-IV that sounded gorgeous outdoors. He played for over two hours with a state of the art light system including a grid that dropped behind the band to serve as projection screen and diffuser for light. All very beautiful and dynamic, and moreso than it had to be. 

               

At Salon.com, James Hannaham writes about Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip, which takes Radiohead’s In Rainbows one better by not only making the album available as a free download (among other formats), but its component tracks are available for download for amateur remixers.

For another artist with a less cultish following, letting fans complete an official release could turn into a kind of suicide: Imagine what might happen if Britney Spears tried it. Taken in another way, however, Reznor could also be working through some ambivalence toward his status as an aging rock star. “Got these lines/ On my face,” he sings on “1,000,000.” “After all this time/ And I still haven’t found my place.”

From the simplicity of some of the songs, built mostly on relatively unexciting breakbeats, distorted guitar chuffing and fuzzed-out vocals — pretty standard for NIN — it seems like Reznor’s revisiting the more straightforward constructions of his early songs, or at least scaling back. Instead of using freaktified studio or laptop gimmicks and whiplash dynamics to add verve, he has opted for industrial ambience — even on that badly mixed ballad “Lights in the Sky” and the final song, “Corona Radiata,” which could be the soundtrack for a 7.5-minute slasher movie, complete with a sinister electronic heartbeat at its core. This minimal, familiar music has left lots of room for NIN fans to splice in their own musical DNA.

Nine Inch Nails headline the Voodoo Music Experience the weekend of Oct. 24-26.