Controversy can often be good for musician’s career, especially when they’re making statements that rile up the establishment and rally fans around them. The BBC, MTV, and other networks have banned or censored music videos by musicians because of the images they contained or the statements they made. Oftentimes, there is an inherent hypocrisy in the way that censors decide what they’re going to allow people to see. It seems like cartoon sex and violence is more acceptable than anything realistic, and sometimes tackling hot topics that upset the status quo can make executives nervous.
Over the last four decades, especially during the 1980s and 1990s when music videos had an outsized influence on popular culture, it’s been interesting to see what sets people off. The following list looks at artists who produced music videos that were censored, taken off of the air (at least for a certain time period) or, in some cases, permanently banned. While the varied reasons for those restrictions might seem absolutely benign today, other videos on this list still might get certain individuals into trouble. Rock on!
Björk
Always one to create provocative art and images, Icelandic icon Björk released two videos from her 2001 album, Vespertine, with the kind of romantic eroticism that was bound to trigger network censors. In “Pagan Poetry,” images of body and nipple piercings are shown graphically and in blurred, stylized fashion, along with some allegedly blurred sexual images (which could just be the piercings looking sexual). She also sings in a lavish dress that reveals her bare breasts. In “Cocoon,” a fully nude Björk in geisha makeup sings while red ribbons stream out of her nipples. They grow gradually longer and engulf her in a red cocoon while she sings of a rapturous love for a man. Once she is completely covered, her body floats up out of frame. Not surprisingly, MTV wasn’t going to show either of these clips.
Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls” wasn’t hyper violent, but it pushed buttons nonetheless. The 1991 video chronicles marital anguish when a woman becomes aware of her husband’s cheating after he comes home late on a stormy night with no explanation. The country icon wanted to use the video to broach the important issue of domestic violence, so after the husband leaves his tryst, he comes home to a wife whose face is already bruised, then he hits her again when she challenges him. When the husband tries to go after their daughter for watching the scene, his wife pulls out a gun and shoots him. CMT and other networks reportedly banned the clip, but it won the CMA Video of the Year award and landed a Grammy nomination. Brooks’ video is still not officially available on YouTube, but you can watch a low-quality recording right here.
Duran Duran
The Fab Five always enjoyed having sexy women in their videos—hey, they were sex symbols themselves. But having models wrestling Sumo wrestlers and each other (in mud), giving sexy massages, and cavorting in thongs, lingerie, or little else for 1981’s “Girls On Film” was just too much for the BBC and other networks. An edited version aired instead, and the uncut original is still not available on YouTube. The video was actually shot a few months before the launch of MTV, the network that would help turn Duran Duran into pop stars in the early 1980s. Despite the ban, this video garnered the band a lot of early buzz.
Foo Fighters
In the Foo Fighters’ video for “Low,” redneck buddies played by Dave Grohl and Jack Black show up at a rural motel, suitcases in hand, ready to make some sort of deal. Instead, they spend the night drinking and throwing up, wrestling, being macho and loud, smashing things, then dressing up in lingerie and vamping for each other before passing out. The next morning, they get dressed, go to their pickups, and act like nothing happened. The 2003 music video made for a risqué commentary on macho men and homophobia, but MTV didn’t consider the content appropriate at the time.
Enrique Iglesias
Enrique Iglesias took an unusual approach to 1999’s “Sad Eyes,” portraying a pop star who is the idol of hordes of beautiful women, yet feels isolated and alone in his private life. So he ends up dialing phone sex numbers, masturbating, picking up sex workers, and generally trying to escape his loneliness with passionless encounters both virtual and real. Naturally, the clip wasn’t going to be shown on MTV, which seemed to consider the video much steamier than it really was.
The Kinks
People probably will scratch their heads when they find out that the Kinks’ 1966 clip for “Dead End Street” was banned by the BBC for being tasteless. It stars the band members as pallbearers carrying a coffin into a cramped city flat to collect the body of a man who’s died. Later the jumps out of the coffin, most certainly alive. The band gives chase in an attempt to retrieve the man, until he vanishes into thin air. The network didn’t like the concept, or the intercut photos showing poor and struggling British people in the streets. We can’t have any of that!
Madonna
Heavens to Madonna, what has the Material Girl not done to push prudish buttons over the years Since the ’80s she has caused a stir by portraying a black saint coming to life, showing interracial kissing, and displaying racial injustice (“Like A Prayer,” which would eventually earn awards from MTV), steamy sex scenes (“Justify My Love”), S&M (“Erotica”) and, in a switch, a violent female crime spree (“What It Feels Like For A Girl”). All of these boundary-pushing videos were quickly yanked from, or outright banned on, MTV. Her controversial 2019 clip for “God Control” focused on our gun violence epidemic and yet again set off haters, although it wasn’t banned.
Megadeth
Major heavy metal acts usually manage to find some way to stir things up, and Megadeth did that with videos for “A Tout Le Monde” (1994) and “In My Darkest Hour” (1988). “A Tout Le Monde” was about suicide, and featured people jumping into an open grave. “In My Darkest Hour” was a performance clip with fans moshing and stage diving but the song, which was inspired by the loss of Dave Mustaine’s former Metallica bandmate Cliff Burton, was misinterpreted as being about suicide. MTV eventually showed “A Tout Le Monde” once the band included a message at the end encouraging young people to seek help if they had suicidal thoughts. Seems some suits don’t understand that writing a song about suicide generally doesn’t mean an artist is encouraging it.
M.I.A.
M.I.A. has never been shy about confronting social issues, particularly the Sri Lankan Civil War as well as her anti-vaccination stance. The video for “Born Free” certainly proved to be controversial. In the 2010 clip, a group of young and teen boys, all gingers, are rounded up by fascist police, taken out to the desert, and forced to run through a minefield, where most die. There is no happy ending or resolution, and the image of one teen being blown to bits looks real. It’s a stark look into mindless prejudice. YouTube reportedly banned the video for graphic violence, although it was later revealed that the platform “obscured” it on their site (i.e. buried it in search results). The safer video game-themed clip of the video remained readily viewable, though. These days you can watch the extended, unedited cut. In 2005, M.I.A.’s video for the track “Sunshowers” was reportedly banned by MTV because she refused to cut certain lyrics, such as “Like PLO, I don’t surrendo.”
Mötley Crüe
While most hard rock and metal acts were limited to Saturday late-night programming by MTV in the mid-1980s, more commercial acts like Ratt and Mötley Crüe still got daytime airplay. Except when it came to Mötley Crüe’s “Girls Girls Girls,” which featured stripper nudity in real-life band hangouts like the Seventh Veil in Hollywood. The video fit with the quartet’s bad boy image, which was further augmented by footage of the leather-clad foursome riding their motorcycles from club to club. The video is like a Star Maps of Sunset Strip strip clubs. The tamer, non-nude version (featured above) is what aired on MTV. Watch the uncensored version right here.
Motorhead
We can tell that late Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister had fun making the video for “Killed By Death.” He rides a motorcycle through the wall of a family house, picks up a hot babe (dressed like Wendy O. Williams), leads police on a wild chase, gets electrocuted, and then emerges from the other side by riding the bike out of his grave. It’s a silly blast really, but MTV execs banned it in 1984 for being senselessly and excessively violent. Maybe they were jealous that they weren’t in on the fun.
Nine Inch Nails
No stranger to controversy, Trent Reznor has unleashed some dark videos on the world, and “Closer” (1994) is his most infamous. It features crawling bugs, taxidermy, brief nudity, bondage, a “crucified” monkey, a dead “beating” heart, and a pig’s head on a rotating rod. For the censored cut (with the word “fuck” edited out), a few offending images were replaced with a “Scene Missing” sign, the nudity was cropped, and only the monkey’s face was seen. Nine Inch Nails’ 1992 black-and-white video for “Happiness In Slavery,” meanwhile, remains effectively shocking today. A man enters a dark room, strips naked, then gets strapped to a mechanical table. Wires and a mechanical arm, followed by metal grinders, tear, rip, and bore into his skin, which results in lots of gushing blood. But the man gets sexual satisfaction from the entire act of self-destruction, and his entire body is eventually ground into meat to fertilize a garden below. Gruesomeness aside, it’s the full frontal nude close-ups that ensured the clip would be banned pretty much everywhere.
The Prodigy
Having a song title like “Smack My Bitch Up” was bound to raise eyebrows at television and radio networks, but what probably pushed more buttons is the surprise ending to the Prodigy’s video. After a hellish night of drinking, drugging, groping women, brawling, puking, and general mayhem—all shot from the POV of the clip’s main character—the final shot offers a reflection in a mirror that reveals the bad boy … to be a bad girl. Maybe that’s what really made some people upset. Either way, the deplorable behavior on display got the clip banned on the BBC and pulled after two weeks from MTV, which didn’t show the video again for four years. Funnily enough, it won Best Dance Video and Breakthrough Video at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards.
Queen
Although they are now canonized by the masses as one of the ultimate rock bands, there was a period where Queen disappeared from the American touring circuit for many years. That started after negative reaction to the video for “I Want To Break Free” (1984) in which the band members dressed up as a family of women in a British flat, with frontman Freddie Mercury vamping it up as he vacuumed. It’s not like we hadn’t seen men in drag before—by then, the 1960 gender-bending Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot had been in steady rotation on American television for decades. Two years earlier, Queen’s “Body Language” video was the first to be banned on MTV because of the writhing, gyrating, and occasionally naked bodies on display.
The Shamen
A popular techno act in the 1990s who featured a young, oiled up Jason Statham dancing in one of their other videos, the Shamen managed to get banned by the BBC for their “Ebenezer Goode” video. One might think the frenetically cut, strobe-heavy clip was yanked for fear of its potential effect on epileptics (it can be rough to watch period), but it was the song’s pro-drug message that really caused the ban. Ebenezer is simply Ecstasy personified, with the catchy chorus going “E’s are good, E’s are good, he’s Ebenezer Goode.” One could also argue that the look of the video emulates tripping on E. The song was spent four weeks at No. 2 on the U.K. charts, including during the BBC’s annual drug awareness week. Irony in the U.K.!
Smashing Pumpkins
Smashing Pumpkins’ “Try, Try, Try” chronicles a day in the life of two homeless young adults, one of whom is an expectant mother. They drink, steal, she reluctantly sells her body, and they shoot up in a public bathroom. While high, she recalls a seemingly idyllic, all-American home life, but the end of the sequence implies she may have been sexually abused, although nothing is shown. Back in reality, she overdoses and is rushed to the hospital, and it’s implied that the baby died. A longer version of the same story appears as director Jonas Akerlund’s short film “Try,” in which the woman’s perspective is told through the voice of a young girl, with the family flashbacks more blatantly indicating sexual and substance abuse in her childhood home. She also dies in the end. One could consider the less intense version of the video as a cautionary tale for MTV viewers, but it got little to no airtime. This from the network that brought us 16 And Pregnant.
Soundgarden
Soundgarden’s fast-paced rocker “Jesus Christ Pose” lent itself to a rapidly cut and trippy video, which intercut shots of band members in the titular pose with images of crosses (right side up and upside down) made of different materials flashing across the screen. And a woman on a cross. The video was banned on MTV because religious groups mistakenly took it as being anti-Christian—it was actually about people who profiteer from religious zealotry—and the groups threatened a boycott. Although MTV eventually relented, the band reportedly received death threats during a U.K. tour because of the controversy.
Thirty Seconds To Mars
The six-minute song “Hurricane” appeared on Thirty Seconds To Mars’ third album, This Is War, in 2009, and the 13-minute short film used to promote it also featured excerpts from the songs “Escape” and “Night Of The Hunter.” The three-part story, written and directed by Bartholomew Cubbins, was banned from MTV for its overt sexual content and a scene of religious figures tossing books of their faith into a fire. It should surprise no one that a music video featuring bondage, S&M, bare breasts, groping, gyrating, and spit swapping would not get primetime MTV airplay. It certainly got many fans hot and bothered, though. When the band made an appearance at NYC’s Museum Of Sex in May 2011, plenty of adoring female fans asked them sexy questions and shared their kinky fantasies. Mission accomplished!
Tool
When you record a song called “Prison Sex,” you’re automatically going to get people’s attention. The 1993 stop-motion animation video by Tool guitarist Adam Jones did not feature the titular act, and the song itself is about the cycle of abuse in which a victim can become a perpetrator because of their trauma. Still, this clip weirded some people out because it features a creepy, H.R. Giger-like mannequin molesting and repressing a small mannequin whose body has been cut in half, its legs dangling high above on a wall of filing cabinets. Despite its MTV ban, the clip was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Visual Effects in 1994.
Twisted Sister
New York glam rockers Twisted Sister angered the reactionary Parents Music Resource Center in 1985 with a video featuring cartoon violence for “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which was a monster hit on MTV in the summer of 1984. But the network backed away from Twisted Sister in 1986 when the group promoted the ’50s-style anthem “Be Chrool To Your Skool” with a tale of a high school-zombie takeover. Shock rocker Alice Cooper made a guest appearance in the campy but gore-filled video, which also featured makeup effects by horror icon Tom Savini. Desk decapitation, anyone Of course, in the post-Walking Dead landscape of 2023, no one would bat an eyelash at this.
Robbie Williams
In the video for “Rock DJ,” one of the most gruesomely fun music promos ever made, British singer Robbie Williams portrays a man trying to get the attention of a hot DJ at a roller rink. When stripping off his clothes doesn’t do it, Williams begins to peel off parts of his body. He finally gets to dance with the DJ when he’s reduced himself to a skeleton—spot-on commentary about how far people will go for attention and how desensitized we’d become to shocking imagery. Considering the video came out 23 years ago, it was pretty prophetic. Fun facts: Even though the video’s ending was censored by most video channels across Europe, “Rock DJ” was named Best Song of 2000 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, and won British Single of the Year and British Video of the Year at the 2001 Brit Awards.
Neil Young
Never one to mince words, Neil Young created a song and video (“This Note’s For You”) that took pot shots at artists who endorse products and compromised their artistry for the Benjamins. In the video, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston are mocked for hawking Pepsi and Coke, respectively, while Budweiser dog mascot Spuds Mackenzie is shown licking the arms of his hot bikini model cohorts. The incident where Jackson’s hair caught fire during a video shoot is lampooned by having “Whitney” pour Pepsi on “Michael’s” hair to put out the flames. MTV certainly wasn’t going to risk offending corporate sponsors or the Gloved One, whose megastardom was a boon to the network. In another twist, “This Note’s For You” won Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards. (Can someone explain to us how that kept happening)