You have to remember that this came out only a year or so after Jeremy by Pearl Jam and No Rain by Blind Melon. We also had America’s Most Wanted in full swing. The music video is partially made up of some scenes of the band playing mostly acoustic instruments while the lead singer does a better version of Eddie Vedder’s performance in Jeremy. The rest is made up of dramatizations of people running away/kidnapped, the consequences, and children’s pictures shown onscreen with their names and how long they have been missing.

The showing of actual missing kids led to some unintended results. It sounds like a good idea at first. I mean one of the members of Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony was found thanks to the TV Movie Adam (1983) that led to America’s Most Wanted, so why not? Well, if you hop over to the Wikipedia page, then you find out there were some bad things that happened as a result. In one case, the girl wasn’t actually missing, but had been killed and buried in the backyard by her mother. Another case was a girl who was forced back into a bad situation after having seen the music video. There are other details there too, such as the multiple versions of the music video with different kids in it. Some are still missing, while others have met unfortunate endings. It’s sad. Thankfully, according to the director, around 30 of the kids were found.

It is a classic both in song and video. It just also happens to be a sad case of the best of intentions turning sour for some.