Nevermind was the second studio album by the rock band Nirvana and was released on September 24, 1991. Produced by Butch Vig, Nevermind was the group's first release on Geffen Records, which signaled its move away from Seattle-based independent record label Sub Pop. Band leader Kurt Cobain sought to make music outside of the restrictive confines of the Seattle grunge scene, drawing influence from groups such as the Pixies and its use of loud/quiet song dynamics.
Despite low commercial expectations by the band and their record label, Nevermind became the surprise success in late 1991, largely due to the popularity of its first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which was an MTV staple. By January 1992 it had replaced Michael Jackson's album Dangerous at #1 on the Billboard charts. The album has been certified ten times platinum (10 million copies shipped) by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The album's tentative title Sheep was something Cobain created as an inside joke towards the people that he expected to buy the record. He wrote a fake ad for Sheep in his journal that read "Because you want to not; because everyone else is." Novoselic said the title was inspired by the band's cynicism about the public's reaction to Operation Desert Storm. Cobain grew tired of the title as recording sessions for the album were completed, and suggested to Novoselic that the new album be named Nevermind. Cobain liked the title because it was a metaphor for his attitude on life and was grammatically incorrect.
The Nevermind album cover shows a baby swimming toward a US dollar bill on a fishhook. According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births with Grohl. Cobain mentioned it to Geffen's art director Robert Fisher. Fisher found some stock footage of underwater births but they were too graphic for the record company. Also, the stock house that controlled the photo of a swimming baby that they subsequently settled on wanted $7,500 a year for its use, so instead Fisher sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots resulted and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spencer Elden, the son of the photographer's friend Rick Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden's penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis, as they were afraid that it would offend people, but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."
The back cover of the album features a photograph of a rubber monkey in front of a collage created by Cobain. The collage features photos of raw beef from a supermarket advert, images from Dante's Inferno, and pictures of diseased vaginas from Cobain's collection of medical photos. Cobain noted, "If you look real close, there is a picture of Kiss in the back standing on a slab of beef." The album's liner notes contain no complete song lyrics; instead, the liner contains random song lyrics and unused lyrical fragments that Cobain arranged into a poem.
Follow Up
The baby who graced the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album has recreated the famous image 17 years on. Spencer Elden was the four-month-old baby photographed in a swimming pool reaching towards a dollar bill on the end of a fish hook. Now a teenager, Spencer Eldon strikes a familiar pose
The picture became the cover of Nirvana's second album, released in September 1991, which went on to sell 26 million records worldwide. Seventeen years later, he has recreated the classic underwater shot, this time wearing shorts. Now the 17-year-old high school student, who lives in Eagle Rock, near Glendale, California and his ambitions are to go to art school next year.
In 1991, his parents were paid $200 for allowing their friend, underwater photographer Kirk Weddle, to photograph their baby. The original photograph and the recent recreation by the British photographer John Chapple were shot from the bottom of the pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Centre in Pasedena, 17 ft (five metres) underwater.
Spencer said: "It's kind of cool, knowing that I've been on an album cover"
"But I feel pretty normal about it because growing up, I've always known I was the Nirvana baby. It never really struck me like, 'Oh, ****, that's me on the cover'."
"Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis. It's kind of cool, I guess," he told the Independent. "I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star. But I'm just a normal kid living it up and doing the best I can while I'm here."
Notes:
Nevermind not only helped popularize the Seattle grunge movement, but it also brought alternative rock as a whole into the mainstream, establishing its commercial and cultural viability. Nevermind's success even surprised Nirvana's contemporaries, who felt dwarfed by its impact and creativity. Fugazi's Guy Picciotto later commented: "It was like our record could have been a hobo pissing in the forest for the amount of impact it had. It felt like we were playing ukuleles all of a sudden because of the disparity of the impact of what they did".
In 1992, Jon Pareles of The New York Times described that in the aftermath of the album's breakthrough, "Suddenly, all bets are off. No one has the inside track on which of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ornery, obstreperous, unkempt bands might next appeal to the mall-walking millions". Record company executives offered large advances and record deals to bands, and previous strategies of building audiences for alternative rock bands had been replaced by the opportunity to achieve mainstream popularity quickly.
Michael Azerrad argued in his Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (1993) that Nevermind marked the emergence of a generation of music fans in their twenties in a climate dominated by the musical tastes of the baby boomer generation that preceded them. Azerrad wrote, "Nevermind came along at exactly the right time. This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored, or condescended to."
Rolling Stone wrote in its entry for Nevermind on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, "No album in recent history had such an overpowering impact on a generation—a nation of teens suddenly turned punk—and such a catastrophic effect on its main creator."
Nevermind has continued to garner critical praise since its release. The album was listed at number seventeen on Rolling Stone's list "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Time placed Nevermind, which writer Josh Tyrangiel called "the finest album of the 90s," on its 2006 list of "The All-TIME 100 Albums."
In 2005, the Library of Congress added Nevermind to the National Recording Registry, which collects "culturally, historically or aesthetically important" sound recordings from the 20th century.
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