Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5
The cover art for Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty was made by Mike Kelley, a visual artist from Detroit who spent most of his career making the art world uncomfortable. Kelley's medium, or one of them, was stuffed animals — thrift-store plush toys that he arranged into sculptures, hung from walls, and photographed in configurations that were simultaneously funny and deeply upsetting. The pink bunny on Dirty is from this body of work: a worn, slightly deranged-looking plush toy that looks like it has seen things.
Sonic Youth had always operated at the intersection of art and music in a way that wasn't performative. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon were embedded in the New York art world before they were rock musicians. Their choice of Kelley for the Dirty artwork wasn't a brand collaboration — it was a conversation between people who moved in the same circles and shared a sensibility about what popular culture could look like when you stopped trying to make it look respectable.
Dirty came out on DGC Records, Geffen's alternative imprint, in July 1992. This was five months after Nevermind hit number one and about ten minutes before every major label started signing anything with distortion pedals. Sonic Youth had been on DGC since 1990 — they'd actually recommended Nirvana to the label — and Dirty was their attempt at something more accessible without losing the noise. "100%" was the closest thing to a hit. The album went gold.
The bunny became iconic in the way that album art becomes iconic: not through any deliberate marketing campaign but through thousands of kids staring at the CD booklet while the music played. Kelley's thrift-store animals took on a life outside the art context they were made for. The bunny was on shirts. The bunny was on stickers. The bunny was, for a certain kind of teenager in 1992, the exact right image to carry around.
Kelley died in 2012. His work now sells for millions at auction. The thrift-store animals that he bought for quarters are in museum collections. The Dirty bunny tee is a bridge between two worlds — Kelley's art practice and Sonic Youth's music — and both worlds have appreciated considerably since 1992.
This one is vintage. There's one.
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Header image: Photo: Monica Dee / SST Records, Public Domain