A music video is a video that integrates a song or an album with imagery that is produced for promotional or musical artistic purposes. They are primarily made and used as a music marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings.
Music music videos rose to prominence in the 1980s when American pay television channel MTV based its format around the medium.
Fast forward, these videos are also streamed on video websites, like YouTube.
And for that many years, music videos have been used by the artists themselves to deliver their message.
Sometimes, these messages are delivered through art, and to do that, sometimes, the art has to cross the boundaries to get its message delivered.
This makes some music videos NSFW by nature, and controversial at the very least.
While defining "NSFW music video" can be subjective and depends on individual perspectives, there is one particular music video that is incomparable to others.
The music video in question, is Pussy by the German Neue Deutsche Härte band.
Just like what the song's name suggest, Pussy is extremely explicit and provocative, that soon after its release in 2009, it sparked discussions on various mediums, including the internet.
It was released as the lead single from the band's sixth studio album, Liebe ist für alle da.
While the music video may not have achieved mainstream popularity in the same way as some other viral videos, it certainly made an impact within the metal and alternative music scenes. The controversy around the video did contribute to its presence in pop culture discussions and added to Rammstein's reputation for pushing boundaries in their art.
And the boundaries the band crossed, is unsimulated sex.
In the entertainment industry, unsimulated sex is the presentation of sex scenes in which actors genuinely perform the depicted sex acts, rather than simulating them.
Although it is ubiquitous in pornographic films, it's very uncommon in other films, let alone music films.
And in the music video Pussy, Rammstein featured hardcore pornography, meaning that everything is clearly seen.
Directed by Jonas Åkerlund and released online on 16 September 2009, the video features the band playing the song wearing leather outfits, interspersed with six hardcore pornographic videos featuring each of the band members as a different stereotypical pornographic character:
- Till Lindemann, the vocalist, as the playboy.
- Christoph Schneider, the drummer, as the CEO.
- Paul Landers, the rhythm guitarist, as the cowboy.
- Oliver Riedel, the bassist, as a BDSM fetishist.
- Richard Kruspe, the lead guitarist, as the party boy.
- Christian "Flake" Lorenz, the keyboardist, as a shemale.
Each scene features a band member engaging in foreplay with a different woman, and the scenes become more explicit as the video progresses until they engage into unsimulated sexual intercourse with graphic nudity.
At the end of the video, the band members ejaculate.
At first, they tried to buy footage of pornographic video to be included in the music video. But they agreed to not do that.
"We could buy the footage, but it was a mess trying to deal with the rights," Jonas Åkerlund acknowledged. "I was about to give up when I had another idea - we could just shoot some footage."
So instead of buying or making things up, they decided to just shoot the whole thing.
"We decided to shoot a porno!" exclaimed guitarist Richard Kruspe.
"We knew we could have made it safe," he added.
"I’ve shot a lot of nudity, shot a lot of different things, but I'd never shot real porn before Pussy. But it takes a minute and then it’s just like any other shoot – the most normal thing in the world. You’re there with your crew and you're like, ‘okay, first day: we're setting up for anal over here. Then we're gonna go for the cum shot over there’ because everything becomes business as usual," he said.
Some band members said that they performed their own sex scenes.
But there are also reports that said the band members were portrayed by body-doubles during some of the close ups of specific body parts, including the sex scenes, where the members' bodies are superimposed to male porn stars.
"When you're going to do this kind of video and make this kind of statement, I feel like you have to do it right," Kruspe continues. "Otherwise, it's not the same idea. And let's face it, we'd never have gotten the kind of numbers we've gotten if we'd done an MTV version."
At first, the band knew the unique challenges.
Besides the explicit content, the lyrics—performed in both English and German—such as "You've got a pussy/I have a dick/So what's the problem?/Let's do it quick," radio was unlikely to ever touch it.
The first place the band uploaded the the music video to, was to an adult website.
In the first week, the music video garnered 6.5 million views.
"So who cares about MTV or radio?" Kruspe said with a laugh.
Sex sells, and music video producers know this too well.
"Pussy" was Rammstein's first number one single in Germany.
But like previously said, Pussy may not achieved world popularity like some other controversial music videos that came before and after it, but it crossed the boundaries by having real sex in it.
No music video before and after it, came close to Pussy.
No other music video dares to include explicit and uncensored sex acts, like fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation and penetration, as well as clear depiction of aroused genitals of both male and female.
Some that dared to come close to pornography, fell short from really doing it.
While some music videos do show breasts and nipples as well as genitalia, none of them can be considered pornographic. While a music video, like Björk's Pagan Poetry, features fellatio and ejaculation, but the music video mostly consists of highly-blurred and stylize images.
Read: Russian Activist Jailed After Sharing Rammstein’s ‘Pussy’ Video On Social Media