10 Banned Hard Rock Music Videos

15 year old Jeremy Wade Dellen taking his life in front of his class by shooting himself in the head was something that Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder has said he needed to “give importance” to. It was the release of Jeremy that was the first step on making Pearl Jam one of the most integral alternative rock acts of the 1990s.

The music video, shot by Mark Pellington, is more of a short-film that artistically shows us the broken child Jeremy, his place in the world and ends climatically the same way that the real story did. However, MTV were not too happy about the shot of Jeremy placing a magnum revolver in his mouth and cut this one moment from the video.

The recut version, ironically, caused perhaps more controversy than the original may have. With the clear suicide angle lost, many viewers interpreted it that Jeremy turned the weapon on his classmates.

In 1996, prosecutors determined the video had played a part in inspiring a school shooting in Moses Lake, Washington. Since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, music stations over the world have rarely to never played the video in any form. Pearl Jam themselves made the decision to step back from music videos and all of their singles from 1992 to 1997 go without an accompanying visual piece.