The grown man who once appeared on Nirvana’s best-selling Nevermind album as an infant posing for a tasteful nude in a swimming pool is now suing the band for child pornography, once again making you pause in a moment of disbelief as you try to remember if that album really did come out 30 years ago.
Spencer Elden, who you might recognize because you’ve seen him naked as a child, you pervert, is suing former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic as well as the Kurt Cobain estate, alleging that the famous album cover “knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer, and they knowingly received value in exchange for doing so.”
For the record, the lawsuit names Kurt Cobain as a defendant too, but he can’t really get sued anymore because, well, Nevermind.
It’s no surprise that Elden harbors resentment towards the band. After all, it’s not like he recreated the famous album cover three separate times, and it’s definitely not like he got the name of the best-selling album title tattooed on his chest, right?
Oh shit, except he actually did all of that.
So when did the owner of perhaps the world’s most-viewed baby genitalia suddenly change his tune?
According to an interview Elden did with GQ Australia in 2016, Elden explained that he became disenfranchised after the band didn’t respond to requests to be part of his art show.
“I was getting referred to their managers and their lawyers,” Elden told GQ Australia. “Why am I still on their cover if I’m not that big of a deal?”
Because that’s not how album covers work, Spencer.
Now we aren’t one to point fingers or draw conclusions, but if we invited the former bassist and drummer of a popular grunge band from the early 1990s to our art show in 2016 and they blew us off, we also very well may be inclined to overreact and sue said former members for using images of our baby penis on their most successful album cover from 30 years ago.
“But I’m just trying to get it out of my head – this image of a baby chasing a dollar – and not worry about making millions of dollars,” Elden told GQ Australia in 2016. “It’s a complicated thing.”
Indeed, we can only imagine how much it must suck: forever being remembered as nothing more than a naive newborn chasing after money.
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