It’s been a week of early 90s Grunge flashbacks; to the sweet days when an old flannel, ripped up jeans, and unruly hair was our daily-do, and Eddie Vedder was our idea of a golden-grunge god. (Ok, ok maybe we never got the memo to retire our flannel, or buy a hairbrush when the millennium hit, but really can you blame us?) At least we’ve been able to catch a ride on the Seattle-nostalgia-bandwagon this week, with the recent reissue of Pearl Jam’s Ten, just 18 years after it’s original release– and yes, we can’t believe it’s been that long either. In lieu of it all, we’ve decided to bring you back to the days when all you wanted to do was move to Seattle and play in a garage band, and “Jeremy” became one of the most controversial videos to hit the MTV airwaves.
Pearl Jam released Ten as their first studio album in 1991, bringing the grime of grunge to the mainstream. It wasn’t long after the release, that the Seattle scene began to explode, spurring an uproar among angst-filled teens and young-adults. “Alive” brought Pearl Jam into the MTV video stream, and soon after, with the release of “Jeremy” the band found itself under intense scrutiny for the controversial video that accompanied the single. Vedder had originally wrote the song based upon a news article about a high school student killing himself in front of his classmates, and when it came time to release a video for the troubling song, the graphic imagery of Jeremy putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger caused MTV to place restrictions on the violent image, forcing Pearl Jam to release a censored, edited version that was MTV-friendly.
After the release of “Jeremy”, Pearl Jam shied away from making music videos, as they wanted fans to focus on the content of their music over the videos, and in 1996 the band was accused of influencing a school shooting in Moses Lake, Washington, because of the graphic imagery for the “Jeremy” video. Regardless of any accusations against Pearl Jam, we have to say, we’d love to take a trip back to the good ol’ days when the Eddie Vedder intensity was raring, but for now we can just sit back in our flannel shirts, and let the crazy look in Vedder’s eye ignite the flame of the grunge-love back into our ears.
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