John Waters on Attending Nine Inch Nails: “I Just Like Looking at the Audience”

Nine Inch Nails’ 2025 shows have been widely noted for their ambition: a four-act structure, a secondary stage, and lighting that pushes the band’s industrial spectacle into something almost theatrical. But for John Waters, the main event in Anaheim earlier this year wasn’t on stage.

“I just like looking at the audience. It’s wild,” Waters said on a recent episode of the La Culturistas podcast. “I just like to look at the kids. I just think they look great and they’re having fun.” At most concerts he attends, he added, he’s the oldest person in the room—“ever since William Burroughs died.”

What interests Waters is not nostalgia. He has no patience for peers who claim their generation did it better. “I hate old people my age who say, ‘We had more fun.’ No you didn’t, you just don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I just like to see the energy of it.”

The observation is a small but precise one: a refusal to alienate the present in favor of a remembered past. It’s also a reminder that live music creates a culture as much as a sound, and that watching how people participate can be as revealing as watching the performers.

Nine Inch Nails are currently on a live hiatus, working toward new music. Waters, meanwhile, remains on his own road, recently announcing dates for his annual Christmas tour. The audiences there, one suspects, will be a little less mosh-ready—but he’ll be studying them all the same.