rank the songs on nirvana's "nevermind"

my friend got his infant pool training at one years old, maybe this one had similar training

How and why is Chad Channing tied up in this?

That seems fair

He's on the Smart Studios demos packed with reissue too.

No smoke without fire

when I was like 11 I remember wondering a lot about that baby, if being on the cover of such a well known CD was gonna stop him from living a normal life somehow. just a dumb thought experiment. I guess we have the answer!

Geffen was concerned that the infant's penis, visible in the photo, would cause offense, and prepared an alternate cover without it; they relented when Cobain said the only compromise he would accept would be a sticker covering the penis reading: "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."

they couldn't have known it was going to become one of the best selling albums of all time when they shot the cover, right?

the only criticism of the cover i can remember was a couple times hearing people (maybe even my parents?) tut-tut that it was cruel or dangerous to put a baby underwater

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Wednesday, August 25, 2021

that was what I remember about the image, not the baby penis. I took my goddaughter to her first "swimming lesson" when she was 8 months old at her parents' request and it was a traumatic experience for both of us

That reflexive breath-holding thing apparently only works until 6 mos., though... after that, yeah, it's a whole other deal.

I vaguely recall an MTV News segment from the time mocking a store that tried to censor the cover, that’s about it as far as controversy.

Pretty sure DGC anticipated sales that were about the same as Goo.

Geffen was concerned that the infant's penis, visible in the photo, would cause offense, and prepared an alternate cover without it; they relented when Cobain said the only compromise he would accept would be a sticker covering the penis reading: "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."

― symsymsym, Wednesday, August 25, 2021 7:00 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The back cover features a photograph of a rubber monkey in front of a collage created by Cobain. The collage features photos of raw beef from a supermarket advertisement, images from Dante's Inferno, and pictures of diseased vaginas from Cobain's collection of medical photos. Cobain noted, "If you look real close, there is a picture of Kiss in the back standing on a slab of beef." The album's liner notes contain no complete lyrics; instead, the liner contains random song lyrics and unused lyrical fragments that Cobain arranged into a poem.

xxpost: well he sure loved violating his own privacy by featuring in all those magazines and documentaries of the album.

This is ridiculous however you want to spin it and will get dismissed as it should.

Way to make being part of something cool something very uncool.

xxpost: well he sure loved violating his own privacy by featuring in all those magazines and documentaries of the album.

it sounds like he couldn't resist trying to capitalise on it when he was younger & kinda got burned by it & now is understandably resentful about the whole thing

but that doesn't make his case not ridiculous

I was just talking irl about how no one ever said anything about the back cover, partially because the collage was so out of focus. Although Walmart later object to the In Utero art and "Rape Me".

It's kind of funny now to think about how scared labels were of retailers back then (particularly Walmart) and the power said retailers had re:stuff like LoveSexy and the Jane's LPs.

There really hasn’t been a more iconic album cover released since Nevermind afaik

Mmmaybe Ready to Die comes close but I would give it to Nevermind

“I wanted the word Nevermind to look kind of underwater and wavy. So I had the type printed out and I held it on a Xerox machine. As it was scanning I wiggled the image and it put waves through it. Then I scanned it again and wiggled it in another direction. That’s how I got the wavy type. Now you’d just go on a computer and use filters or whatever, and people say the wavy type is kinda cheesy. But back in the day it was groundbreaking damnit!”

this is so awesome

sounds like the kind of thing you bring up to help launch your own project.
Is it well known everywhere that that baby is this specific guy. Like he doesn't have to not walk around with a giant arrow attached to him to deny it or something. THat Nevermind tshirt with the arrow pointing up from the baby to his face so he can walk around saying Hell No that ain't me.

I just wonder, can see the tabloid press coming back to him every few years to say this is this baby now or something though.

Surely it's quite well accepted that trauma can lead to acting out and destructive behaviour so the idea that he can't have been hurt or bothered by it because he's sought publicity etc. doesn't hold as an argument, whatever the actual case.

Maybe… but he knew he didn’t have a case if he said TMZ was on his doorstep every 5 years. trying to spin the album cover as child porn is still a highly questionable approach to me.

That’s the sole reason I can’t seem to muster any empathy towards his case compared to idk the kid who played anakin skywalker who just wants to be left alone nowadays.

trying to spin the album cover as child porn is still a highly questionable approach to me.

Stated in those terms (which I'm not saying is a misrepresentation) it certainly seems absurd and my knee-jerk reaction is that's got to be bad faith on the part of the legal team at least. But I've not made any attempt to be informed on the details so I wouldn't like to make a call.

I don't remember the nakedness being an issue at the time and I think if anyone had said it was pornographic it would generally have been considered a them problem.

Then again, the Banksy-style do-you-see is basically We Are All Prostitutes.

The parental advisory sticker had just come out the previous year. We were in the midst of grade-A prudishness as a culture. There would have been an uproar if there was a hint of one to be had.

lot of ppl are conflating 2 different things - understandably bc the suit is based on conflating them - an issue about consent wrt creation & reproduction of images of oneself, esp intimate ones (which should be taken more seriously in general) & a claim or implication that images featuring nude children (or anyone tbh but that’s a whole other thing) are inherently sexual or pornographic (which is bullshit & contributes to the kind of sexualisation it’s supposedly targeting). I do wish ppl were a bit less flippant about the 1st thing though

idk if the idea is that the porn angle is more likely to succeed than just making it about consent, & if so whether that’s true - i hope not but I wouldn’t be surprised

Xp yep

And yeah they're obviously testing the spaghetti method but that's Not so harmless and it's important to call bullshit.

yep, agree

Wait, what??

Wasn't that your post about "unnecessarily realistic art" etc?

i think you're conflating my explanation of what the case was about with what i actually thought of it

which kind of brings us back to, this is what lawyers do. in fact, i would be surprised if channing himself (and even elden) believes the judge would buy that the infant was being depicted as a sex worker, which is what they're initially going for

at any rate, i was referring to left's main point, not what he said in parentheses, which i assume is what you're referring to: "(which is bullshit & contributes to the kind of sexualisation it’s supposedly targeting)"

i still don't agree with this, by the way. i think the "if you want to censor it, you're the pedophile" has to be the silliest and most juvenile argument.

there's a point where you want to protect your child, your own self as a child (in elden's case), and children in general from predators. just because you don't have sexual thoughts when looking at naked babies doesn't mean there aren't others looking for this kind of imagery in public, which is why unfortunately these kinds of restrictions need to exist.

just because you don't have sexual thoughts when looking at naked babies doesn't mean there aren't others looking for this kind of imagery in public, which is why unfortunately these kinds of restrictions need to exist.

Agree. We must scrub society of any and all images or phrases that someone, somewhere might want to jerk off to.

so, i was expecting that. there are degrees. there's no need to go to such extreme, right?

but talking specifically about this case, you are refusing the right for a person to do what he wants to do with his body, which i think is a lot more dangerous.

which kind of brings us back to, this is what lawyers do.

Good lawyers aren't known for deluting reasonable/strong claims (such as the lack of a signed release, if that's true) with wild ones.

*diluting

but talking specifically about this case, you are refusing the right for a person to do what he wants to do with his body, which i think is a lot more dangerous.

This guy spent more than 10 years doing everything he could to draw attention to the fact that he was The Baby From The Nirvana Album. There are multiple interviews in which he talks about how he attempted to use it to get laid. Once he realized he wasn't going to get rich (or laid) from it, he sued and claimed to be a traumatized victim of child pornographers. Now, he's free to do that, but there's a broader context here that people seem to be consciously ignoring.

Good lawyers aren't known for deluting reasonable/strong claims (such as the lack of a signed release, if that's true) with wild ones.

― Shallot Shortage 2021 (morrisp), Thursday, August 26, 2021 12:06 PM (fifty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

that presupposes that a "good" lawyer is enough to win a case and that we live in an ideal world with unambiguous laws

unperson, those are ad hominem attacks

xp If you're saying the outcome is unpredictable, should this actually go to trial - I agree.

I think the divide here is btw. posters analyzing the apparent strength of the claim, and others talking more generally about the ethical/moral issues that the case raises.

well, sure, i agree with that. but i would add that there's a lot of speculation of his character based on what people read through gossip/sensationalist sites/magazines.

Perhaps, though the way unperson characterized it above is pretty directly supported by that 2016 interview (more accurately: he said he was getting laid, but the "hot chicks" would dump him once they learned he's not rich). That doesn't mean he's lying about feeling increasingly uneasy about how the fame of the cover has affected his life.

Kinda cool article on p4k about this phenomenon of cover models suing artists, some of which I hadn't heard about:

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/a-brief-history-of-musicians-being-sued-by-their-album-cover-subjects/

That is a good article, I'm impressed Pfork pulled that together so quickly.

It seems like people don’t like finding themselves on album covers. It’s not flattering to them. This should be kept in mind by artists.