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Nirvana · S3 E6
The Swimming Baby
September 24, 1991. Nevermind is released with a cover photo of a four-month-old baby swimming naked toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. DGC expects to sell 250,000 copies. By Christmas, it is selling 400,000 copies a week. In January 1992, it knocks Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the number one spot on the Billboard 200
A swimming pool in Pasadena, California, summer 1991. Photographer Kirk Weddle holds a four-month-old baby named Spencer Elden underwater, clicks the shutter, and captures the image that will stare back at thirty million people from record store shelves around the world.
"Jeremy," Pearl Jam, official music video (1992). The other video that proved alternative rock could shock mainstream America into paying attention. Where Nirvana's album cover used a baby and a dollar bill, Pearl Jam used a classroom and a true story. Both images cut through the early 1990s pop culture noise with something too disturbing to look away from, and both were debated, censored, and endlessly replayed.
The Concept
The idea starts with Kurt watching a documentary about water births on television, fascinated by footage of babies moving through water in their first seconds of life. He tells art director Robert Fisher he wants a baby underwater on the album cover, reaching for something. Fisher hires photographer Kirk Weddle, who shoots four-month-old Spencer Elden at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena.
Sources
Michael Azerrad, "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana," Doubleday, 1993
“I said, the only way I'll agree to censor it is if we put a sticker on the cover that says: If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”
— Kurt Cobain, on DGC's suggestion to cover the baby's genitals on the Nevermind cover, from Michael Azerrad, "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana," Doubleday, 1993
TAP TO REVEAL: How much was Spencer Elden's family paid for the most famous album cover photo of the 1990s?
Jeremy, Pearl Jam (1991)
Based on a true story: Jeremy Delle, a fifteen-year-old student at Richardson High School in Texas, who took his own life in front of his English class in January 1991. Eddie Vedder read about it in a newspaper clipping and wrote the lyrics. Mark Pellington's video won four VMAs in 1993, including Best Video of the Year. Listen for how Vedder's vocal builds. He starts almost conversational, narrating the story flatly, then climbs to a scream on the repeated line "Jeremy spoke in class today." MTV censored the video's final shot. Like the Nevermind cover, the "Jeremy" video proved that the most powerful images of the early 1990s were coming from alternative rock, not the polished pop that had dominated the previous decade.
The Dollar Bill
The fishhook with a dollar bill was Kurt's last-minute addition. It turned the image from a beautiful photograph of a baby into a statement about what the world does to innocence. The cover says everything Kurt felt about the music industry in a single frame: something pure, born into water, already reaching for money before it can even walk.
Sources
Michael Azerrad, "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana," Doubleday, 1993
Nevermind Cover: The File
Serve the Servants, Nirvana
The opening track of In Utero (1993) begins with the line: "Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old." It is Kurt's direct response to everything the Nevermind cover promised. The swimming baby reaching for money became a prophecy: Nirvana made millions, and Kurt could not figure out whether that meant he had won or lost. This song is the sound of someone who got exactly what the dollar bill was offering and wishes he hadn't reached for it.
Serve the Servants, Nirvana
Kurt opens In Utero by addressing the media circus, his absent father, and the weight of being the voice of a generation he never asked to represent. The lyrics are unusually direct for Kurt, almost conversational, as if he is too tired to hide behind abstraction anymore.
What inspired Kurt Cobain's idea for the Nevermind album cover?
September 24, 1991. DGC releases Nevermind with a modest marketing push and hopes of selling maybe 250,000 copies. Thirteen weeks later, it knocks Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the number one spot on the Billboard 200. Next: the week Nirvana becomes the biggest band in the world.
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