Nirvana - Nevermind

For this post I wanted to find one album cover to look at and unpick. I looked through controversial covers, influential covers, symbolic covers and came across Nirvana's Nevermind album cover. I never really listened to Nirvana but I remember seeing this cover, I also never knew what it meant so I was excited to do some research and find out what a naked baby swimming underwater towards a dollar bill on a fish hook meant and how that relates to their music.

Nevermind turned a nation of teens onto alternative rock, the album is known as one of the best rock albums of all time. Their music has a definitive rock/grunge sound with influences like Led Zeppelin and the Pixies. While late lead singer Kurt Cobain has said his lyrics don't mean anything, are collected from poems, that they are not important, many songs were written to reference his personal experiences and emotions. For example in the song "Heart-Shaped Box" he conveys his relationship with Courtney Love through lyrical themes of pregnancy and the female anatomy. The band, as with most rock/grunge/metal bands, is also known for being anti-establishment which explains this cover. The idea for the cover came to Cobain and former drummer Dave Grohl after they watched a television program about water births. They took the idea to Robert Fisher who then looked for an image of a water birth to put on the cover, unfortunately the images he found were far too graphic to put on display and so sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take photos. After deciding on attaching a dollar bill to the fish hook the cover was done. The reception of the album cover wasn't all good though, there were concerns that the baby's penis was visible and that people would interpret the image as dangerously close to pedophilia.

(http://cnettv.cnet.com/making-nirvana-nevermind-album-cover/9742-1_53-6870.html)

There are many opinions about what the symbolism of this cover is. Maybe it doesn't have a meaning, maybe it's an inside joke. My interpretation of the newborn baby swimming towards a dollar bill, and I'm sure I'm right, is that from the moment we are born, money is God. Life is all about money and the quest for it, the need for it. The fact that the dollar bill is on a fish hook represents someone elses control over it, it is up to them whether we achieve it or not. These themes of lost innocence and materiality fit right in with Nirvana's musical and lyrical style. It is a little scary to look at yet it has humour.