Nine Inch Nails - Closer

Nine Inch Nails: Closer (Uncensored) (1994) from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.


After watching the new Trent Reznor project How to Destroy Angels, I had to post this video.

Closer is Nine Inch Nails most well-known song and probably the most well-known video. Even though both the song and the video were censored, it was on heavy rotation on MTV in the mid-90s.

How Nine Inch Nails made it to the mainstream is still a mystery to me. The 90s was not a good time for electronic music. The glitz and glam and the plastic, colorful shallowness of the 80s was being rejected. The rough singer-songerwriter and the garage band were kings of the 90s as grunge exploded. Perhaps thats how Nine Inch Nails made it into hearts of angry teens of the 90s.

Whether you like their aesthetic or not, Nine Inch Nails kept synths alive in the 90s. The only other electronic music going on was the techno/house/electronica raver scene, but that music never really made it to the mainstream. While that era of electronic was important, most of it was repetitive and formulaic, with some notable exceptions (Aphex Twin is one).

This video is reinterpretation of the stop-motion short film, Street of Crocodiles, inspired by the art work of Joel-Peter Witkin. Check them out and you can see what I am talking about.

The Dead Weather - Treat Me Like Your Mother

The Dead Weather is a super group made up of the best people in two good bands, White Stripes (Jack White) and The Kills (Alison Mossheart) and supporting members The Raconteurs and the Queens of the Stone Age. They don't really sound like any of those bands, but if you mixed them altogether it would pretty much sound like The Dead Weather. They play dark, brash, garage rock.

The video is gritty and visceral. It is an interpretation of a Clint Eastwood styled Western shoot out with a dark and sultry, modern day veneer. Automatic rifles and leather jackets instead of pistols and ponchos. One of the coolest parts of the video is a reminiscent of a shoot out from Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead". We see the light shining through the bullet holes peppered across the duelers backs. Sexy.