The video for Prodigy's latest single, "Smack My Bitch Up," premiered this weekend on MTV, just after it had been heavily criticized by a woman's group and two large retail chains pulled from shelves "The Fat of the Land," the album the song is on.

\\On Friday, Wal-Mart and Kmart each yanked the album from over 2,000 stores and the National Organization for Women released a statement demanding that the album be labeled with parental advisory stickers and that the promotional posters be destroyed. "Do we want young men to think that beating up on women is cool?" said Anne Conners, president of NOW's New York City Chapter. "This is a dangerous message to send when we live in a society where a 1997 U.S. Department of Justice report found that 26 percent of female homicide victims are murdered by their husband or boyfriend." The organization also condemned MTV for airing the video, despite the network's decision to play it only late at night and preceded with a warning statement.

\\MTV defended its decision to air an edited version of the video in a statement that read in part, "We decided to air the video because it's groundbreaking and we wanted to give our mature viewers the opportunity to see it." The video -- shot from the perspective of an androgynously dressed subject whose face is not shown until the last scene -- depicts the subject grabbing women in a sexual manner, snorting drugs and having sex with a stripper. At the end, the subject is shown to be a woman.

\\Controversy over the single began Wednesday when a Los Angeles Times article questioned the band's label, Maverick, and Maverick's distributor and part-owner, Time Warner, for releasing the album without cautionary labels, for releasing the video and for sending out 3,000 posters with the slogan "Smack My Bitch Up" for use in in-store promotion.

\\Responding to the criticism, a Warner Music spokesman said the label continues to back the song and blames the L.A. Times for instigating the controversy. "We've gone five months with this album and this track and had no complaints," said Bob Merlis, senior vice president worldwide corporate communications for Warner Bros. Records. "The L.A. Times created a story where none had previously existed."

\\The song, which features the line "Change my pitch up/ Smack my bitch up" chanted numerous times, was released two weeks ago by Maverick Records as the third single from the band's "The Fat of the Land" album. The lyric is sampled from a hip hop track by the Ultramagnetic MC's, "Give the Drummer Some."

\\Prodigy's Liam Howlett issued a statement on Friday, saying, "We refer to 'Smack My Bitch Up' as a phrase used for doing anything intensely. Like being onstage and going for extreme manic energ