“Happiness in Slavery” is a song by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails from the 1992 EP Broken. Released in November 1992 as a promotional single, it takes its title and refrain from Jean Paulhan’s preface to Pauline Réage’s 1954 erotic classic Story of O—the novel that fixed consensual erotic slavery in modern literary imagination. The track peaked at number 13 on the U.S. Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Nine Inch Nails’ performance of the song at Woodstock ’94, later on the festival compilation, won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1996. For kink-media history, the song is inseparable from its near-universally banned music video starring masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan.
Music Video: Torture Garden Machine and Flanagan
Directed by Jon Reiss, the video draws on the 1899 novel The Torture Garden by French author Octave Mirbeau. Flanagan enters a large room, places a flower and a candle on an altar, strips, washes, and lies on a machine that straps him in. Robotic claws tear his skin and impale his hands; he responds with pleasure. Drills pierce him; blood drips onto a garden fertilized by human blood. Grinders escalate the injury. As he screams in mixed pleasure and pain, the machine disembowels him, kills him, engulfs the body in a metal cask, and minces it into fertilizer. At the end, Trent Reznor—shown singing from a cell at the start—enters the room and begins the same ritual; the video fades as he lights a candle.
The clip was almost universally banned on release, later appearing on the Closure video album and in the Broken film. It aired on MuchMusic’s Too Much 4 Much showcase for videos barred from regular rotation. Reznor said the video was not pure shock value but “the most appropriate visuals for the song,” tied to artistic freedom after his fallout with TVT Records. Pairing industrial rock with Flanagan—already famous for living with cystic fibrosis and performing extreme SM—made masochistic ecstasy and mechanical domination explicit on music television’s edge.
Track Listings and Charts
U.S. promotional CD (PRCD 4795) carried the LP version (5:26). PRCD 4827 added a “Flaccid edit” (4:17) beside the LP cut. A U.S. promotional 12″ single listed: “Fixed version” (6:09), “Sherwood Slave Mix” (2:17), “PK Slavery Remix” (5:41), and “Broken version” (5:21). Chart success on Modern Rock Tracks put literary SM language into alternative radio rotation; the Grammy for the Woodstock performance cemented the song in metal/industrial awards history.
Samples and Legacy for Kink Listeners
Canadian extreme metal band Strapping Young Lad sampled the track for “Centipede” on the 1997 live album No Sleep ’till Bedtime. That metal-world pickup kept the riff and the slavery-title charge circulating outside pure NIN fandom.
For BDSM-aware listeners, “Happiness in Slavery” matters as pop-industrial translation of Réage/Paulhan’s erotic-slavery thesis: happiness found inside total submission, set against Reznor-era industrial rage and a machine that literally consumes the masochist. Paulhan’s preface to Story of O had already framed slavery-as-fulfillment for literary erotica; NIN put the phrase on alternative radio and then on a video so explicit that most outlets refused it. Flanagan—living with cystic fibrosis, staging real pain as art—gave the clip documentary weight no actor alone could fake. The banned video remains one of the most extreme mainstream-adjacent SM films of the 1990s: torture-garden fantasy, body horror, and a genuine pain-play artist in one sequence, later preserved on Closure and in the Broken film for collectors who could not see it on television.
Related topics: songs about BDSM, Story of O, Bob Flanagan, Nine Inch Nails Broken, Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, and industrial rock’s long affair with domination imagery. If you map kink into 1990s music video history, this single is a hard stop: Grammy-stage industrial, literary SM title, and a machine-garden execution of the masochist that broadcast standards could not swallow.
