10 Music Videos Banned By MTV
5. Nine Inch Nails - Happiness Is Slavery (1992)
Nine Inch Nails are hailed as the musical project that brought industrial rock to the mainstream. Trent Reznor is one of the more unique talents in the music business. His exploration of the tortured mind has yielded tracks as hard rocking as Terrible Lie, and as tender as Hurt.
But his fixation with the darker confines of the psyche has led to the creation of some fairly disturbing pieces of art. He's never shied away from finding the most visceral visual representations for his music. Closer might be his most well known video, and it's considered to be one of his most controversial, but it pales in comparison to this.
Happiness Is Slavery was so widely criticised that it was banned outright. Even today it's hard to come by, with only the opening sequence available on YouTube. That's probably no bad thing, even the written description is enough to make you wince. The video depicts a man undergoing some ritual form of flagellation and sadomasochism. After lighting a candle in front of an alter, the protagonist strips off before strapping himself into a torture device. Mechanical arms proceed to tear the guy apart as he derives pleasure from the experience...
From the sound of it, Reznor might have gone too far on this one.