10 controversial music videos that would never be made today

Sonic Youth – ‘Death Valley ‘69’

Back in Sonic Youth’s early no-wave days, they teamed up with transgressive filmmakers Richard Kern and Judith Barry to make a lo-fi video featuring Lung Leg, who also appears on the cover of the band’s album EVOL. For their Bad Moon Rising track ‘Death Valley ‘69’, she appears looking deranged, blood around her mouth, while members of the band are shown in states of dismemberment, their guts hanging out of their stomachs. 

Of course, this isn’t the kind of video to ever be shown on MTV, but even now, it feels like bands just don’t make videos quite as gutsy as this anymore. It’s gross, it’s DIY, it looks cheap and messy, but that’s what makes it so good. The video epitomised the bridging of the visual and musical elements of the no-wave scene, which defined the New York underground in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Perhaps there needs to be some kind of no-wave revival if we want to bring boundary-pushing videos like this back?

Lady Gaga and Beyoncé – ‘Telephone’

If you were born in the late ‘90s or early 2000s like me, then your childhood might have similarly been defined by being enthralled by each new Lady Gaga video, whether you liked her music or not. Of course, much of what she was doing took inspiration from Madonna, but what impressionable young mind could resist the strange allure of a dramatic video like ‘Paparazzi’ or ‘Bad Romance’? Then came ‘Telephone’, a collaboration between Gaga and Beyoncé, which was pure pop perfection, accompanied by a Jonas Åkerlund video taking inspiration from Thelma and Louise with a hint of Quentin Tarantino.

You just don’t get videos as imaginative and cinematic anymore – there’s a whole storyline here and some talking segments, with Beyoncé bailing Gaga out of a rather sapphic prison where she’s been doing some very scantily-clad dancing, only to go and poison a bunch of people in a diner. The outfits are outrageous, including the use of yellow caution tape instead of clothes, while the editing is choppy and dizzying. It’s pure controversy and spectacle, and there simply aren’t any pop stars who would make something like this today, I’m certain. 

Robin Thicke (featuring Pharrell Williams and TI) – ‘Blurred Lines’

God, the uproar that came with the release of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ video was such a defining moment of 2013. I was 12, and on the cusp of growing out of getting my music taste from watching the 4Music chart show every day, but for a few more months, I had it on loop on the tiny TV in my bedroom as background noise. During this time, the video, full of half-naked women in skimpy outfits parading around men dressed in suits, was one that kept reappearing on the chart countdown, its controversy seemingly propelling it to greater success. You couldn’t escape it. 

At that age, I couldn’t quite comprehend just how vile the song and its music video really were. The objectification of the women in the video, which included a 21-year-old Emily Ratajkowski, was astounding; all it did was treat women as vapid sex objects. Even worse, in the uncensored video, the women actually appeared topless in skin-coloured G-strings. The lyrics, “I know you want it,” didn’t help, either. The backlash the video received was strong, though, and I can’t imagine anyone attempting to make such a shocking and overtly sexist video today without being cancelled on the spot. 

Marilyn Manson – ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses (When The Heart Guides The Hand)’

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Marilyn Monroe’s Lolita-inspired ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses (When The Heart Guides The Hand)’, which came with a video featuring his then-girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood, who was just 19, while the singer was 38. The video sees the pair engaged in some explicit activity, with some realistic-looking sex scenes accompanied by shots in which she appears to be touching herself while watching him perform. Then they also get showered in blood while getting it on.

Not only is the video shocking enough on its own, but Wood later claimed that she was coerced into filming the sex scenes, which she claims were unstimulated after she was given absinthe, making them non-consensual. These days, you’d hope that a video made under such circumstances, with such an uncomfortable age gap and uneven power dynamic, wouldn’t be given the green light. There’d hopefully be much more backlash now compared to the mid-2000s, too. You’d hope so, anyway.  

Nine Inch Nails – ‘Closer’

Nine Inch Nails have always liked to immerse themselves in a bit of controversy, evidenced by when Trent Reznor rented out 10050 Cielo Drive, the very building where the Manson family committed their infamous murders. He even named his studio Le Pig, a reference to the words ‘PIG’ left scrawled in blood at the crime scene. When the band made the video for their erotic industrial rock masterpiece ‘Closer’, why expect anything less than a series of shocking images?

The video sees Reznor swinging about in leather and fetish gear, while a beating heart is wired up, and most controversially, a monkey is tied to a crucifix, looking visibly frightened. Of course, these days, PETA would go crazy over this evident animal abuse, which was somehow much less problematic in the ‘90s. Directed by Mark Romanek, the video certainly gained notoriety, but it’s a pretty terrific piece of visual accompaniment for the song, besides the poor little monkey.

Nirvana – ‘Heart-Shaped Box’

For a band who always tried to stay rooted to their DIY grunge beginnings, Nirvana boasted some pretty high-budget, high-profile music videos during their rise to mainstream success, and 1993’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ is both one of the most iconic and most disturbing. Directed by Anton Corbijn but largely made up of ideas drummed up by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, the music video spurred a considerable degree of controversy upon its release.

After all, a video featuring imagery of crucifixion, a little girl in Ku Klux Klan robes, and fetuses strung up from trees could hardly be described as middle-of-the-road. Inevitably, the video’s content caused some outrage among Christian commentators back in the 1990s – though it seems unlikely those same people would ever be attracted to Nirvana in the first place. 30 years on, though, it seems rather unlikely that a modern-day band would ever create something so deliberately controversial.

Mötley Crüe – ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’

In truth, this entire list could have been concocted entirely of prime Mötley Crüe music videos, so if there is another that you believe is more cringeworthy than ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’, please substitute in your own pick, as they all tend to be guilty of the same crimes. This 1987 example of hair metal hedonism, though, is awash with fully-fledged misogyny, seeing the leather-clad band ogle various women at a strip club – some in cages – in between various shots of motorcycles.

As a video, it is about as on-the-nose and outdated as the song itself. While it certainly isn’t the only video to centre around scantily-clad women dancing proactively, it is among the only ones to deal with those themes in such a leering, wolf-whistling way – as though it was directed by a teenage boy who has never spoken to a girl before.

Björk – ‘Pagan Poetry’

Trying to predict what Björk will do in any kind of situation is a pretty impossible task. Even still, very few people expected her video for 2001’s ‘Pagan Poetry’ to come out like it did. Featuring explicit shots of real-life sex between the Icelandic songwriter and her then-partner, Matthew Barney, the video was certainly unorthodox and caused an expected degree of controversy as a result.

Unlike various other entries on this list, there is nothing overly offensive about the content of the ‘Pagan Poetry’ video, unless you are particularly offended by sexually explicit content, but given the fact that music videos often exist largely as promotional material, the likelihood of any other artist – past or present – delivering the same kind of content seems impossibly slim.

Kanye West – ‘Famous’

More accustomed to controversy than most on this list, Kanye West – or Ye, as he is now known – has consistently strived to shock and applaud. Even before his more recent descent into neo-Nazi politics and anti-semetic hate speech, though, the rapper caused some upset with the music video for his 2016 track ‘Famous’.

The song’s content is controversial enough, with West claiming that he made Taylor Swift famous after his famous interruption of her acceptance speech at the VMAs, but the video took it a step further by including shots of a prosthetic, naked body meant to resemble Swift, alongside the likes of Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Kim Kardashian, and various other famous figures. It makes for uncomfortable viewing, particularly since many of the people depicted gave no consent for it to happen.

Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg – ‘Lemon Incest’

You only need to read the title of this song to gauge why it was – and still remains – such a controversial part of Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s respective discographies. Introducing her daughter to the musical realm, the legendary French songwriter, along with co-writer Frédéric Chopin, decided that the best course of action was to write about an incestuous, paedophilic relationship between the father and daughter duo.

To top it all off, the accompanying music video centred around a shirtless Serge in bed with his pre-teen daughter, making for some incredibly uncomfortable viewing. In the years since this bizarre song and video infected the airwaves, Charlotte Gainsbourg has repeatedly denied that the song had anything to do with incest, but neither the song’s title nor its horrendous video appears to support that claim. It is impossible to imagine any other father-daughter duos even considering creating such a thing in the modern age, but then it was equally as shocking back in 1985.