10 Most Insane Controversies In Rock And Roll Music

The MTV generation had certainly come a long way from where it started during the '90s. After the dawn of the channel during the '80s gave way to some of the most outlandish videos the world had ever seen, it gets a little bit harder to deal with censorship, always making sure that the ratings would stay up and there would be no backlash. So when you have something that looks like it could be it's own layer of Hell, you can understand why some of the video executives would start to see some problems.

Since the Downward Spiral is far from a pleasant journey as an album, Trent Reznor's video for Closer followed suit, depicting him in some sort of bondage dungeon, full of nudity and some disturbing imagery like a monkey being tied to a crucifix during the shot. For a while, MTV actually considered banning the video entirely, until Reznor had a stroke of genius when it came to censor it.

Not wanting to cut out any of the disturbing parts of the video, most of the "edited" portions only displayed a black card saying that the scene was missing. For all of the censoring, those black screens were enough to scare people anyway, almost trying to guess at what kind of deranged fantasy Reznor originally had in store for the video. You can try to protect your children from something that you think is scary, but censoring these scenes made us more aware of the scariest thing of all: your own mind.