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"In the deeply unsettling body-horror video, the Metal Machine Music man literally becomes a machine, a sort of failed reanimation experiment/gene-splice of Max Headroom, Hellraiser’s Pinhead, and maybe a member of Star Trek’s Borg collective. The bizarre experimental film of sorts was the work of the legendary Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who by 1986 had co-directed many groundbreaking videos that had been in heavy MTV rotation — like the duo’s own “Cry” (one of the first music videos to feature digital morphing technology), the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” and “A View to a Kill,” and most notably Herbie Hancock’s android-packed “Rockit,” a five-time VMA winner. For that latter video, Godley & Creme had utilized the existing “robotic sculptures” of British artist and inventor Jim Whiting. But for “No Money Down,” they had to commission a custom Reed facsimile, after they realized that the famously cantankerous rock legend had zero intention of appearing in the video himself. 

Reed did agree to sit for a facial mold-casting to create the uncanny-valley final product. “I remember Lou had to have his face covered in plaster for about 15 minutes, breathing through a straw in his nose. They made this head that was operated by two or three people offscreen. It blinked. The mouth could move. Looking back at it, after three seconds, you know it's not Lou Reed — unless he wasn't feeling particularly well on that day,” Godley jokes. "But I think it was a bit disturbing, if you had bought into the fact that it was really Lou for an instant, when he started pulling his eyes apart. That was pretty grotesque. And that was the intent. So yeah, I think it was looked upon [by MTV executives] as, ‘Oof, we’re not sure about this. No one's dancing!’ Yes, that was a weird one.” 

 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/35-years-later-lou-reeds-banned-no-money-down-video-is-still-the-stuff-of-nightmare-fuel-230216192.html 

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