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This week in music history:

Jeremy is probably the most recognizable Pearl Jam song and video; it’s considered the tune that pushed them passed the “Seattle sound” label and into mainstream music stardom in the early 90s. The song and video however were, and still are significant for a much larger reason.

January 8th, 1991: a 16 year-old from Texas shot himself in front of his class; his name was Jeremy Wade Delle and his story is a major part of the inspiration of the song – pay special attention to the last scene in the video which caused A LOT of controversy. The last scene was interpreted by many people as the student shooting his classmates when in fact what was being told was the real life story of Jeremy Wade Delle shooting himself in class.

In order for the video to get played on video stations they had to remove the scene showing the student with a gun in his mouth leaving many to speculate that the blood on the students was their own, and not that of the student portraying Jeremy. So much controversy surrounded this video that Pearl Jam stopped making them at the time not wanting (as Jeff Ament said) “our songs to be remembered as videos”.

In fact, Pearl Jam didn’t make another one until 1998 and that was an animated video for Do the Evolution, and to this day we don’t see a lot of Pearl Jam videos.

This song/video was blamed for another teen suicide in ’96 and then following the Columbine shootings in ’99 the video was rarely played by video stations.

Restricting, monitoring or censoring songs and/or music videos that deal with teen violence or the subject of suicide is something that will never go away.

The question is: “Is it helping anything?”

=matt

Posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 2:12 pm by Matt Wells and is filed under Headlines & Current Events.

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