10 Legendary Rock Songs That Were Insanely Controversial

Out of all the bands to come from Seattle at the height of the grunge movement, Pearl Jam seemed to have their attention focused outward much more. Nirvana and Soundgarden may have had songs about inner pain and torment, but Eddie Vedder was more into telling stories, like the disturbed girl who never gets proper treatment on Why Go or the woman who is disowned by her family on Daughter. This was more like reporting in song half the time, until the one day when they danced a little too close to reality.

Coming out of the first sessions for Ten, the lyric sheet to Jeremy told the story of a real life event that Eddie had heard about in the paper, being shocked by a teenage kid who shot himself in front of his classmates. That's already some pretty heavy subject matter to put in your potential single, but the real controversy came when they went to do the video, which didn't hold back in the slightest in terms of raw aggression. Telling the story pretty much how it happened, the original version was shunned by MTV for being too graphic, including a scene where the actor playing Jeremy puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth.

The censoring didn't help matters either, removing the frame and instead making it look like Jeremy had turned the gun on the rest of his classmates, which would become all too prophetic in the next few years in the wake of the Columbine tragedy. The grunge movement is easy to look at through rose colored glasses these days, but there was a lot of raw pain that people forget about as well.