Smells Like Teen Spirit

OK – that’s probably not the best choice for a title to a post on a forum for people required to register as sex offenders, but hopefully most who saw it recognized it as the title of a 1991 song from the ‘Nevermind’ album, put out by the alternative grunge band Nirvana.

The Nevermind album was famous for two things, first, the success of it’s opening track, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that catapulted the band to success, and second, for it’s iconic album cover featuring a naked baby swimming towards a dollar on a fish hook. I really liked the song when it first came out (though the lyrics were quite difficult to comprehend) and similarly curious was the symbolism of the cover art, which was often interpreted to imply that from birth we have an inborn impulse to chase money. Cool.

Never did I consider the album cover to be child porn. Apparently neither did the 300,000 people PER WEEK who bought the album, driving it to number one in sales on the Billboard list in January of 1992. Nor did any law enforcement agent in the thirty years since the album has been out there, otherwise we’d have millions of CP possession convictions for it. I imagine that most people saw the artwork in the same context as Anne Geddes pictures of naked babies in flower pots, or that famous black and white poster “L’Enfant” by Spencer Rowell of the muscular guy holding a baby that hung in many a co-ed’s dorm when I was in college.

Never would I recognize the baby from the Nevermind cover if I bumped into him on the street, nor would I have reason to even know what his name was… except that NOW, Spencer Elden (that’s his name) is suing Nirvana band members, the record company and others, calling the images child pornography, claiming his ““true identity and legal name are forever tied to commercial sexual exploitation” and his complaint goes as far as to argue the dollar bill makes it seem as though Elden is “like a sex worker”.

I’m going to sidestep discussion on the lawsuit or Elden’s motivation behind it. In fairness, if he feels he was wronged I’m not about to victim blame. The purpose of this post is to comment on the subjective interpretation of the Nevermind album cover and how the same image can be perceived as totally innocent to one person, and child pornography to another.

in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart in the US Supreme Court decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio, famously described his threshold test for obscenity as “I know it when I see it”, . But clearly that can’t be the test if some people considered the album cover obscene, while most others didn’t think twice about it. In fact, according to Variety Magazine, lead singer Kurt Cobain, at the time, considered putting a sticker on the cover saying, “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.” In other words, using the test Justice Stewart applied, is the operative word “I” or “it” in the phrase “I know it when I see it”. Is it the image that’s obscene or is it the viewers perception of the image?

(Clearly there’s a line to cross in this analysis. If the album cover would have depicted Elden doing something sexual, that would have been obscene)

By now all of us have heard about parents who got arrested after bringing film to be developed, when the clerks come across pictures of their kids in a bath. My first reaction to hearing that has always been “what’s wrong with that guy?” Do some people really think that’s child pornography? If so, when did it become so? I imagine most of us who were born decades ago, have a picture of us getting our first bath in some album somewhere in our parent’s house. I’m sure none of our parents thought twice about it at the time, but nowadays I wonder how many are second-guessing themselves.

Can you imagine if Elden’s lawsuit makes it to the Supreme Court and Jacobellis v. Ohio gets revisited in this modern climate where everyone is so hyper-sensitive?

To be absolutely clear, nobody in this forum defends actual child sexual exploitation and we are all strongly against it. But if modern society has become so puritanical that people have to worry about being sued or prosecuted over an image that’s been floating around the public domain for 30 years without a second thought, Do you think it’s time we took down all those Renaissance paintings that have been hanging across most of the Museums in Europe for the last 600 years?