It’s been quite a year for the Flaming Lips — they’ve released something pretty much every month, including a 24-hour song and an EP in a gummy bear skull. And, of course, they’ve managed to thoroughly piss off Erykah Badu by releasing an unapproved cut of the video for “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.” The video understandably caused quite a stir, given that it involved Badu’s sister Nayrok sitting stark naked in bathtubs full of glitter, blood, and a substance that looked like it was supposed to be semen. After Badu went public with her concerns about the video, it was expunged from the Internet — so with the album from which the song is taken, namely The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, finally getting a proper release this week — we thought we’d round up some other, um, challenging videos for your viewing pleasure. Like most Flaming Lips videos, these are all pretty NSFW, but as far as we’re aware, they were made with the full consent of all involved.
Klaxons — “Twin Flames”
Like “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” this caused quite a stir when it was released a couple of years back, and it’s not hard to see why — it depicts a weird orgy featuring conjoined high schoolers, and lots of… um, well, we hope it’s saliva. It’s a pretty remarkable piece of work for all that it’s both thoroughly disconcerting and, dare we say it, weirdly sexy.
Dir En Grey — “Obscure”
Another orgy, except this one comes with cannibalism, vomit, dismemberment, dead babies, and a weird bubbling oleaginous fluid that’s somehow the most unsavory thing about the whole unsavory affair. Yikes.
Marilyn Manson — “Heart-Shaped Glasses”
There’s an argument to be made that the whole idea of Marilyn Manson having sex with Evan Rachel Wood would qualify this video for this list, even if they didn’t end up doing it covered in fake blood. Either way, this just about trumps “(s)AINT” and “The Beautiful People” as far as Manson schlock value goes.
Rooks — “Bet It All On Black”
It takes a certain dedication to indulge in throwing up black vomit for the sake of your art. Apparently this was done with lots of milk and lots of black food coloring — thankfully for all involved, it only required one take.
HEALTH — “We Are Water”
A well-executed nod to the glory days of slasher movies, this story of a homicidal lunatic pursuing a girl through a forest features plentiful blood and gore, along with a denouement that has half the world’s population instinctively crossing their legs and wincing, even though the aforementioned homicidal lunatic clearly deserves what’s coming to him.
DyE — “Fantasy”
We’re not sure about the teen-sex-urges-as-uncontrollable-ravenous-monster narrative here, but either way, the second half of the video — which recalls, among other things, the aesthetic of Japanese WTF anime and that ghastly fluke monster out of The X-Files — is definitely gross (and also the cue for another bout of spontaneous leg-crossing).
Robbie Williams — “Rock DJ”
There’s something about the idea of skinless bodies that freaks us the fuck out (we still have nightmares about that bit in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a good five or so years after reading it), so it goes without saying that we find the last couple of minutes of this virtually unwatchable. You’ve been warned.
Serge Gainsbourg — “Lemon Incest”
Oh, Serge.
Nine Inch Nails — “Happiness in Slavery”
You can keep your Cannibal Corpses and your Necrophagias — we’re pretty sure that this is the single most disturbing/grotesque/stomach-churning video that anyone’s ever committed to celluloid. It involves performance artist Bob Flanagan stripping naked and strapping himself into a heinous torture device, and is hideously graphic in depicting all the fun stuff that ensues thereafter. (This is absolutely 100% NSFW, by the way, and probably not great in general to have on your screen if someone walks up behind you unexpectedly.)
Tool, generally
Take your pick, really. “Stinkfist”? “Schism”? “Aenima”? “Sober”? Or maybe the ten-minute opus “Parabola,” which features shit-vomiting aliens, along with Tricky, of all people, dissecting a weird alien creature and then getting his synapses fried by some bizarre machine? Yeah, OK, that’ll do nicely.