Pearl Jam's Jeremy

I never listened to music if I could help it. I didn't buy records or CDs. But, back when MTV got its start, I had friends who watched it all the time even though, at the beginning, they just played the same few videos over and over. It was all-white at that point. One video was an attack on the press by a rock star who thought that tabloid TV was "the evening news". They kept showing an interview with this imbecile sharing his deep thoughts about journalism.

Pearl Jam has posted the uncensored version of their "Jeremy" video on YouTube. I remember seeing it. Even back then it seemed like a terrible idea to show a shirtless teen model consumed with angst shooting himself in front of his class. Why romanticize that? 

The song was based on a real kid who did the same thing. There was no clear reason for him killing himself other than clinical depression. Doing a popular song and a music video about it was obviously a nightmare for his family. The kid in the video resembled the real kid to a degree.

When Stephen King published his first book, Carrie, he got the publisher to also put out his earlier, unpublished novels. They didn't want a sudden glut of Stephen King books on the market, so they were published under the name Bachman. One of them was about a kid who takes his class hostage with a rifle.

Some time after the book was published, a kid somewhere took his class hostage with a rifle. When he surrendered, police found he was carrying a copy of King's novel. 

King told the publisher to withdraw the book. He didn't need money that bad. And King is completely anti-censorship. He's defended writers like Salman Rushdie and recently Woody Allen when his jackass son helped stop publication of his memoir. In the case of Rushdie, when bookstores announced they wouldn't stock or would remove his book, King told them they wouldn't be selling his books, either, and they changed their minds.