Jeremy (song)
| "Jeremy" | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
| Single by Pearl Jam | ||
| From the album Ten | ||
| Single released | 1992 | |
| Single format | ||
| Recorded | March/April 1991 | |
| Genre | Grunge | |
| Song length | 5:18 | |
| Record label | Epic Records | |
| Producer | Pearl Jam, Rick Parashar | |
| Chart positions | #15 (UK) | |
| Pearl Jam single chronology | ||
| "Even Flow" 1992 |
"Jeremy" 1992 |
"Black" 1992 |
"Jeremy" is a song by Pearl Jam, from their album Ten. One of their first singles, the song concerns the true story of Jeremy Wade Delle of Dallas, Texas, tormented by his peers and ignored by his parents, who shot himself in front of his high school English class on the morning of January 8, 1991. Delle, who was 16 at the time of his death, was described by schoolmates as "real quiet" and known for "acting sad"; after coming in late and being told to get an admittance slip from the school office, he returned to class holding a .357 caliber Magnum revolver. He walked to the front of the class, announced "Miss, I got what I really went for", put the barrel in his mouth and fired. The police report indicates he died instantly.
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder said about the subject of the song: "you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. [...] it does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger than those people. And then you can come back".[1]
Music
The song features prominent usage of Jeff Ament's 12-string Hamer bass guitar, adding a harmonically rich sound to the introduction and end of the recording. The song starts off with the bassline and quiet harmonic notes also on the 12 string bass, and continues in a sedate vein until after the second chorus, when densely layered guitars and vocals gradually enter. At the end the instruments gradually fade out until all that is audible is clean guitar and 12-string bass, like the intro. Both instruments play a descending minor key melody, fading out with one single note.
The video
The award-winning video, directed by Mark Pellington, was released in 1992. It portrays the verse's lyrics mostly faithfully, with footage of Vedder singing and atmospheric shots of the other band members flashing up, almost subliminally.
Jeremy (in the video) is shown running through a forest and screaming at a man and woman sitting at a dinner table. They ignore him; this is intended to show that Jeremy's parents didn't listen to him or pay attention to his troubles. As the song becomes more dense and frenetic, the video follows suit, with strobe lighting being used and Jeremy's temperament becoming more hysterical (at some points he appears to be screaming and crying at the same time). Around this time, a particularly iconic scene is shown, depicting Jeremy standing, arms raised in a V (as the lyrics describe at the song's outset), in front of a background of billowing flames. This shot is revisited a short time later, with Jeremy staring at the camera, a malevolent smirk on his face, wrapped in a US flag.
There is a scene where the kids in the classroom are saying the Pledge of Allegiance and have their hands over their hearts. For less than a second, the children have their arms raised in the Nazi salute. Some have viewed the salute as a reference to the tradition started in the 19th century of American children raising their right hands towards the flag in what has become known as the Bellamy salute, but both the director's comments on this and the revelation of a deleted scene from the video cancel this theory out.
The final scene of the video shows Jeremy striding into class, tossing an apple to the teacher and standing before his classmates. We see him reach down and draw his arm back as he takes the gun out, then his arm appears to be weighed down; we don't actually see the gun, but it is obvious what's going on. The video then cuts to an extreme close-up on Jeremy's face from the nose up, he closes his eyes tightly and then the screen cuts to black. The next image seen is a panning shot of his blood-covered classmates, all completely still, recoiling in horror.
Video interpretation controversy and alternate footage
Because of the censorship issues with regards to MTV, director Mark Pellington was informed prior to filming the video that he could not show Jeremy putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, in his final edit of the video. As such, Pellington was forced to improvise by way of zooming the footage of Jeremy's face from the nose up with a flash of light going off as the camera quickly cuts to the still shot of Jeremy's blood soaked classmates.
This ambiguous close-up combined with the defensive posture of Jeremy's classmates and the large amount of blood on the classmates of Jeremy (splattered mainly on their chest region) led to an alternate interpretation of the video and its ending, to those who were unaware of the actual story behind the song. This alternate interpretation has Jeremy shooting his classmates, not himself, and the panning shot of the blood covered classmates, frozen in time, represents Jeremy's victims at the moment they were shot and killed.
Pellington himself is dismissive of this interpretation of the ending of the video. The director has stated that he did film the sequence where viewers see Jeremy shoot himself (footage which was used with a zooming effect, so as to remove the gun from the picture) as well as a slightly different take of the sequence where Jeremy's classmates give the Nazi salute in the classroom, in that it prominently featured a swastika-bearing Nazi flag in the background of the classroom.
Following the release of the video, lead singer Vedder, backed by the rest of the band, began boycotting videos, believing them to go against what the band was about. The band did not release another video until 1998's Do The Evolution. Scott Elsmore, a huge Pearl Jam fan, was here December 2005.