The Nirvana Nevermind Baby Fulfills the Greed Prophecy

Get this . . . in what has to be THE biggest example of irony I've ever seen, the baby photographed for Nirvana's Nevermind album cover 30 years ago and is suing the band for using him to profit off of child pornography.

Go figure. That baby is doing exactly what the picture parodies. The photograph is a wonderful joke. A biting piece of satire. It's like a political cartoon. It depicts the notions of greed and exploitation. In Nirvana's case, it represents a record company shamelessly fishing for its consumers - American youth - with total disregard for their best interests.

So that baby's name is Spencer Elden. He filed a lawsuit against Nirvana, Courtney Love, photographer Kirk Weddle and various record labels. Elden's lawyer is Robert Y. Lewis of Marsh Law Firm PLLC. According to a biography page on the company website, Lewis specializes in representing survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Amongst the allegations made in the court documents are that the band "knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer, and they knowingly received value in exchange for doing so," and that "the Defendants failed to take reasonable steps to protect Spencer and prevent his widespread sexual exploitation and image trafficking."

The suit also alleges that, "Defendants used child pornography depicting Spencer as an essential element of a record promotion scheme commonly utilized in the music industry to get attention, wherein album covers posed children in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention, and critical reviews."

It goes on to cite other examples of such album covers, including Scorpions' Virgin Killer, Blind Faith's self-titled debut, and Balance by Van Halen.

Upon its release in 1991, several major US record chains refused to stock Nevermind and Kurt Cobain only agreed to the artwork being censored if any covering sticker read: ‘If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile’. The cover remained unstickered, but it has continued to ruffle feathers.

Back in 2011, the Nevermind artwork was briefly banned by Facebook. In 2016 Elden hooked up with the New York Post to recreate the iconic photo on its 25th anniversary.

He told the newspaper, "The anniversary means something to me. It’s strange that I did this for five minutes when I was four months old and it became this really iconic image. It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember."

The same month he told Australian GQ Magazine, "I’ve been going through it my whole life. But recently I’ve been thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t OK with my freaking penis being shown to everybody?’ I didn’t really have a choice."

The Coppertone baby is now 66. Her name is Cheri Irwin. Her mom Joyce Ballantyne Brand was a commercial artist. In an Inside Edition interview from 2014, Irwin defended her mom's decision to use her for the ad and the innocence of the image. Irwin said she was happy the world had embraced the iconic image. She had come into the news, because at the time, Facebook had banned the image as going against their standards. Another lady had posted an image of her daughter at the beach on Facebook. The photo parodied the Coppertone baby ad. The image was taken down. News agencies picked up the story to examine if the standards were necessary or if people's touchy perceptions were getting silly.

Should children be used in advertising? Should advertising depict real life? Should artists depict real life? Should writers write about people who have not specifically given them permission to do so? Mother Teresa? Adolf Hitler?

And what about all the naked animals in the media? Images of nude animals do it for some people. Or vegetables, for that matter. Pick anything. There's a kink for it.

On second thought, maybe the guy deserves some compensation. The image is iconic. But to get some money out of the machine in this way, using inflated and disingenuous claims. Icky.