Top 5 Most Disturbing Nine Inch Nails Videos! (Totally NSFW!)

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Fans from all around the world have flocked to Los Angeles to wave goodbye to Nine Inch Nails, playing (UPDATED with new info) three final shows this coming week: Sunday at the Echoplex, Tuesday at the Fonda and Wednesday at the Wiltern. Other than being bummed I didn't get tickets to these shows (not for lack of trying; the flood of highly organized NIN superfans pretty much caused the entire Internet to shut down once tickets went on sale--still not entirely convinced they weren't somehow behind that Gmail outage the other day), I can't help but think back to my youth circa The Downward Spiral, when Nine Inch Nails were the coolest band around, producing the kind of music that you dearly hoped that your parents would be pissed off about, even if they didn't actually care.

But for as anarchic as Trent Reznor's lyrics may have been ("gotta listen to your big time hard line bad luck fist fuck," "Wish"), their videos were frequently freaky, creepy and otherwise unsettling. (And essentially the perfect verboten entertainment fodder for 12-year-old boys, even if Reznor assuredly had greater artistic goals in mind.)

So let's head into the void one last time and count down the five most disturbing Nine Inch Nails video of all-time. Mostly (extremely!) NSFW--there's going to be some penises, people.



1992: "Pinion"

The Broken EP launched a lot of disturbing videos, like this one, directed by Eric Goode and Serge Becker. This video just seemed kind of funny to me the first time I saw it, but now I can see that there's a definite eerie effect, caused more by the sparse instrumental track than the Shocking Twist Ending. But it's also still kind of funny. (I mean, come on.)