As MTV celebrates its 30th birthday, it seems poised for a calm middle-aged life in a nice neighborhood, where it can safely raise Jersey Shore and Teen Mom into even more reliable moneymakers. But it wasn't always that way: Before it gave up on music, MTV swept through American households by breaking adventurous music videos from bands that would come to define an era. More interesting than those videos, though, are the ones that didn't get shown, or at least pissed everyone off afterward.
Narrowing the dozens if not hundreds of worthy competitors for this list down to 10 was, admittedly, difficult and somewhat arbitrary. Who's to say that raunchy sex is more controversial than disturbing violence? Further, a video that made the world lose its shit in 1989 probably wouldn't even raise an eyebrow today.
With all that in mind, hit the jump to see the 10 craziest, most controversial videos ever made. If we left out your depraved favorite, post it in the comments.
10. 2 Live Crew -- "Me So Horny" (1989)
Music, TV, and sex seem like a three-way that has existed forever, but the reality is that it took videos in the late '80s and early '90s like this one to really tie the knot. There are scores of others that played with the same themes -- George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" from 1987 and Madonna's "Justify My Love" from 1990, to name just a few.
We chose this one because, characteristic of 2 Live Crew, it doesn't mess around -- every aspect of this video is explicitly and unabashedly about sex and hooking up. In order to get its video on MTV, the group created an alternative version with slightly less skin. We have videos like "Me So Horny" to thank (or blame, depending on your perspective) for imitators like Eric Prydz's steamy "Call on Me" workout-themed video.
As a side note, a judge declared the album As Nasty as They Wanna Be to be obscene in the wake of this song's success, which predictably gave a boost to sales. For awhile, clerks caught selling the album were arrested. The courts later determined it not to be obscene.
