It seems to me to be a bunch of pretentious crap strung together, like a great deal of music videos.
Care to share why you may or may not like it? It seems a great deal of people like it, I wonder why.
I love Johnny Cash, but I can’t stand this song. I don’t much like the original NIN version either. He had so many great tracks from his years at American, why did this boring cover become his hit?
The video is ok, though uninspired and unoriginal. Seeing images of Cash in his final years is pretty powerful though.
One of the finest songs written, and one of the finest covers recorded. I happened to catch the video on the day it was released. just amazing.
Never saw the video, but I never liked the song, either from NIN or Cash. I always thought it odd the song was so well liked. Just differing tastes, I guess.
I can’t stand the NIN version, but I felt the Cash version was very powerful. I liked the imagery in the video because I felt it was meaningful in itself and tied in with the meaning of the song. Plus the juxtaposition of a young, hale Cash wandering around his childhood home… in his middle age with June… and in the present, old and decrepit… it was very powerful.
I rather see profundity in Johnny Cash - who fought his own well publicized drug addictions years ago - covering a song about a drug-addicts lament and acceptance of his inevitable doom - and sorta morphing it (only a couple words were changed) to a reflection on a life spent, for whatever it was worth.
The video - showing vignettes of Johhny Cash’s career - is equally candid. Much of it was spontaneous - turning the wine bottle over, spilling the sand.
Pretentious? Maybe. Prolific, profound? Definitely.
I too loved Cash’s version but hated the NIN original.
The video is nothing special; pretty unoriginal and “straightforward” if you ask me. I always watch it though, since I really like the song.
Personally I loved it, both the song (in the original and the cover) and the video.
When I first heard the cover I thought “this is no good, not the Johnny Cash I know”. After his death a friend forced me to watch the video - it brought tears to my eyes. It’s grown on me ever since, he was an amazing man.
While this song is a lot darker than his usual stuff, it does fit in with his some of his style of play, as he often sung about being in prison, a ‘wanderer’, a highwayman, fatherless, walking the line, picking his old guitar…of course many of his other songs had a happier country tone, but I thought the Hurt video fit well into Johnny Cash’s life. And I’d rather see one of the greatest voices of all time in a video containing clips of his life than anything else you see on MTV nowadays.
Oh. My. God.
I thought I was the only one! Everyone I’ve ever met absolutely loves this video, and I have the exact same thoughts as the OP.
Just, thank you for this thread.
The first time I saw it, it brought tears to my eyes. I love the song, and I love the entire album. I thought it was powerful and poignent.
I like it too. Johnny Cash never once sounded phony or pretentious to me. I hate country music but I loved Johnny Cash. He was beyond genre, IMO.
another redeeming factor about the HURT video- it actual put to good, emotionally-stirring use footage from that good-hearted wrong-headed Johnny Cash Christian vanity project- THE GOSPEL ROAD. I hated that film even as a kid and aspiring Jesus-film conoisseur. The Crucifixion scene as used in the HURT video (especially with the piano strikes times with the nails being driven) is riveting! … Ewww! Pun not intended!
I like the song, but I don’t like seeing Johnny Cash old, I like to remember the younger Man in Black.
One thing to remember is that the video was originally planned to be shot on a soundstage, but Cash was too sick, so they filmed it at his home and the nearby defunct House of Cash museum, and padded with older footage.
It’s the best music video I’ve ever seen. The spilled wine, the look on June Carter Cash, incredibly affecting.
when he points at the camera as he says “You are someone else” really hits home to me.
The video sent shivers down my spine the first time I saw it, even though I knew how ill Cash was and how much he had aged over the past decade. Seeing the contrast of the different phases of Cash’s life and career, maybe not an original idea, but it worked when mixed in with the newer footage of Cash as he was late in life- the past, the legend, and the real man in his twilight. A perfect combination of song and video, IMO.
I didn’t hear the NIN original until after I heard the cover, but I remember a friend and I trying to explain to her boyfriend (a NIN fan who hated the cover) why we thought Cash’s version was better. Plus I like why Cash said he chose to cover “Hurt”; he said in at least one interview that it’s the kind of raw, honest song he wished he could have written in his younger days about his drug problems.
The NIN song is far far better then Cash’s. His is just ok. It seemed way overdramatic at a few points.
And his voice just isn’t right for that song.
lol. I find intentionally bucking trends pretentious.
I really do not like the NIN version anymore (I did in my younger days), but Cash’s version is powerful. The video is even more powerful and did/does bring tears to my eyes each time.