Saturday 24 March 2018

Great moments in music video history #2 - Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW)

The second in a very occasional series, and my first post in 13+ years of blogging to require a NSFW warning (hence posting it at the weekend when, presumably, most of you aren't at work).

Today's great moment in music video history is the obvious one, coming, as it does, from the promo to accompany The Prodigy's 1997 single Smack My Bitch Up. It got to number eight in the UK chart and, aside from Firestarter, was their only single to crack the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. So it must have been doing something right. For me, it's not their finest hour but the video... well, even 21 years down the line, it's a powerful four and a half minutes of anyone's time. Sex, drugs, violence and a terribly messed-up protagonist, this has all of that. And it's still sufficiently shocking, a generation later, to be hard to find on YouTube. No doubt it violates their terms of service, or some such. Thank goodness for Vimeo, then.

In the very unlikely event that there is someone out there reading this who doesn't know the big reveal, I won't spoil it by saying what happens at 4m20s, other than that the video rewards a second watch, to spot all the clues. But I repeat, NSFW. Don't say I didn't warn you.

2 comments:

  1. Don't remember seeing the video on TOTP at the time, I wonder why?! I did spot the clues although until the end they had only prompted some question marks for me. Mind you, my first thought was of Peter from DTTDE :-)
    (D'ya know, I just had to look up what NSFW was...been too long out of the workplace, perhaps. I thought maybe it was 'Not Suitable For Wimps'!)

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    1. Yes, heavily censored back then. And ha, yes, this sort of semi-horrific night out is quite "Peter", isn't it?

      Well, it's not suitable for wimps either, so all is well.

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