10 Most Controversial Music Videos Ever

The controversy over Closer feels like a whole lot of something over a whole lot of nothing, but it did cause considerable backlash and therefore deserves to be included.

Obviously the lyrics themselves ‘I want to f*ck you like an animal’ for example, aren’t going to be to everyone’s tastes, but then neither are Nine Inch Nails. The video features lots of shocking imagery, but nothing which particularly flirts with controversy.

It’s just a bunch of random dark imagery to complement the slightly twisted music. It’s difficult to imagine many people loving the song yet being put off by the accompanying visuals. Still, complaints came thick and fast and most channels only ran edited versions.

Set in a mad scientist’s lab, we see a monkey on a cross, a heart beating through a coil of wires, a diagram of a vagina, a severed pig’s head and Trent Reznor dresses in fetish gear. It’s similar in a way to The Prodigy’s Smack My B*tch Up (left out here for the sake of variety) in that it’s all grisly but fits perfectly with what the song is about.

A clear case of people who didn’t like the song anyway complaining about how it was presented.