10 Most Controversial Hard Rock Songs Of All Time

From the time he formed Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor’s music always had a feeling of inner turmoil. Though their debut Pretty Hate Machine set the band up nicely, people were disturbed as to where the band were going after they put out the EP Broken. Once the Downward Spiral finally hit the streets, the opening song gave us the least sexy song about sex.

The song already sounds off-putting, with the hypnotic piano noise and Reznor’s tortured delivery, but things got so much more disturbed once you saw the video. At the time, this may have been one of the most messed-up things ever put on MTV, with images that featured a monkey on a cross, bondage gear, and a disembodied heart beating in time with the song.

For as much as artists were fighting against censorship, many stations outright refused to play the video. To alleviate the problem, Reznor replaced the offensive images with pieces of dead air, which may have been a slight stroke of genius on his part. Once the audience sees those bits of dead air, they start to fill in the pieces in their head, which makes for something even more bone-chilling. This song already is a disturbing tale of control and addiction, but as far as videos go, this is horrorcore before the genre even existed.