10 Perfect Rock Songs That Were INSANELY Controversial
2. Closer - Nine Inch Nails
One of the biggest stumbling blocks that comes with censorship comes down to the music video. While it's easy to show poetic license when you're writing song lyrics, it gets a little more complicated when you have to bring some visuals into the mix. And when Trent Reznor made one of the most off putting songs about sex ever written, the video had to deliver on all fronts as well.
When the first music video for Closer was released on MTV, people were genuinely disturbed by what they saw, featuring nudity and imagery that some would have considered sacrilegious, such as a monkey being tied up to a crucifix. Even though it tied in perfectly to the disturbing nature of the music, it was still too much for MTV to really handle, leading to Trent taking another pass at it and removing some of the controversial scenes to make the big wigs happy.
The way he decided to remove the scenes though was pretty ingenious, taking just the footage out of the scene and replacing it with a black screen with text saying that the clip had been censored. By laying it out cut and dry, it actually makes the video that much more terrifying, as you start to wonder what could have been so off putting that it wouldn't have shown up in the video. The station may have gotten what they wanted, but they also learned a valuable lesson abut censorship. While you can shield yourself from the visuals all you want, your brain will always fill them in something that much scarier.