Chapter 2


How big of a deal is Nevermind? Weird Al big. The whole shebang, the cover, the song, the video, the voluntary royalties (Weird Al doesn't hide behind parody defense, he pays licensing up front and asks for permission. His execs lied to him and told him Coolio was fine with it, or he wouldn't have done that one; that's a televised apology from Al himself). Mind bogglingly humongous, and Nirvana was sincerely thrilled. They nearly imploded every week and Kurt killed himself 3 years later, but that's outside the scope of this analysis. 

So, cover art. This is like one of the 3 most imediately recognizable covers in history. Sandra mentioned the infant, but let's really explore it. It's genius. 

The story is even better. Kurt was interested in water births at the time, so some poor unsuspecting label intern had to sift through image after image of babies being born in bathtubs just to say "uh, sir, we can't publish any of this as the album cover." So, they hired an underwater photographer to go to swim classes, but that wasn't working either, so the photographer said to one of his assistants "can i just take a photo of your newborn baby? It'll take like 15 seconds. Thanks, here's $200." 

Any person on earth would feel conflicted if they were that baby. The dollar bill on a fish hook was obviously added later, and it's obviously social critique. It's not hypocrisy, it's division of money. Geffen won that gamble, and the trickle is what the trickle is. It cost millions of dollars to make this album with no guarantee that it would sell. I don't hear Grohl and Novoselic bitching about all the worse albums they helped bankroll by hitting it big with this one. There's no sinister plot afoot, our economy is designed around rich people playing heads up poker in the televised final of a WPT tournament, no mention of who payed anybody's original entry fee. Some guys are there on their own private winnings, some guys are there on borrowed money with a whole line of people waiting to get back their investment with interest. 

It's hard to call this photo exploitation, because it's not. It's coincidence. Should Spencer get royalty checks for this cover? Technically the answer is no. He could turn it into his livelihood if he wanted to prove the album cover right, but that seems pretty horrible. You can't ignore the fish hook.

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