The thing is, amidst all this controversy, a lot of people simply refused to watch the video at all. But that’s a much longer conversation for another time.) (Though that could easily start another debate about what the channel did allow in those hours. I’m not really sure it would have been the BEST idea for this video to air after school. (It would take another 4 years for the uncensored version to make its way onto MTV2 during a countdown of the most controversial videos of all time.) And in a lot of ways, that was a far compromise. And only after Kurt Loder warned me that what I was about to see might offend me.
#The prodigy smack my bitch up full#
See, this was pre-YouTube so even though “Smack My Bitch Up” was already available in the UK where it was all-but banned, (you could hear a lyric-free version on the radio and forget even trying to say the full title on any airwaves) US audiences waited with serious anticipation to see what their broadcasters would do and openly debated what the best course of action would be.įor those who don’t remember, MTV agreed to air a censored version of “Smack My Bitch Up.” But only after midnight. Now, I’m from the US so I remember there being a big debate over what MTV was planning to do once the video was released here.
So when news came out that The Prodigy had a track and video called “Smack My Bitch Up,” to call it controversial would be something of an understatement. And it called attention to a lot of the sexism and misogyny that were so very present in music and videos at the time. It’s when Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin all collectively told me to pick up an acoustic guitar, stop waiting for a cowboy and burn the mother ‘effin house down. I don’t know…maybe it’s just because I was watching a lot of VH1 at the time. By 1998 it felt at times like all we had left was bubblegum pop, nu-metal and Will Smith.īut see, I also remember the late 90s as a time when intense feminism was a dominant voice in pop culture. People were dying young or at least getting out of the game and there was nobody waiting in the wings to go on next. A lot of the genres and sub-cultures that had made the 90s so exciting (alternative rock, street-based hip hop, the electronic rave scene, etc.) had started to flame out pretty quickly due to drug use, violence or some awful combination of the two.
We’re in full blown nostalgia overload for the mid-late 90s (because they were AWESOME.) And the end of the decade, particularly when it came to music, was a little bit of a let down. So, I can’t help but notice that the internet has been talking a little shit about the late 90s recently.
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