THE NIN HOTLINE

Yesterday, a package arrived at my doorstep, delivered from Hong Kong. Within it was an unopened, limited edition Shinya Tsukamoto Laserdisc box set from the mid-90s. Considering that I don't know any Japanese, and don't have a laserdisc player, this is kind of a weird thing to have bought. However, the reason I picked it up is because on the fourth disc, Tsukamoto's MTV promo clip, which we only discovered the existence of this year - which has a soundtrack penned by Nine Inch Nails. Yes, I paid an embarrassing price for 50 seconds of video on a Laserdisc, but in a way, you paid for it if you'd ever bought anything from our Goodrock store or our merch page.

Anyway, on with the content! I'll be sending the box to our resident archivist, ItsJustDave, so we can extract the video and audio, but in the meantime, I've located the paragraph in the 24 page booklet that came with the box set (boxed set?) which gives some background on the clip. You can read the original Japanese alongside a photo from the shoot in this massive scan I made.

If you can read Japanese as well as I can, here's a translation graciously provided by nofrills (deconstructer):

5) MTV JAPAN Original Station ID <1993/VTR/50 seconds>

Made by Tsukamoto Shinya as the first-ever station ID for MTV Japan, this video was called "TOH (Top of the Hour)". It was used from September 1993 til August 1994.

So far, a number of famous film-makers have made the TOH in the US. This time - exclusively for MTV Japan - Nine Inch Nails, who had been asking Tsukamoto to do their promotional video, penned the music. With this familiar melody [sic] by NIN, the video almost feels like a scene from the movie Tetsuo.

The film won the Station/Network ID award at New York Festival 1994. [The copywriter fails to mention "who", but somebody] attended the ceremony and got tumultuous applause.

MTV Europe started using this TOH video in February 1994 for the opening title of the Rock Block programme.

I'm not sure when we'll get around to making a high quality rip of the video clip, but keep your eyes peeled here (or follow us on Twitter) and one of these days we'll link you to what we've found. I'm pretty sure its' going to be much higher quality than the clip on Youtube.