In a new A photo circulated two weeks ago of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un taking turns driving a Russian-made limousine in Pyongyang, North Korea. The sight of two dictators cruising around was unsettling, but also ripe for a particular kind of mockery. Shortly after the photo was published, a meme began circulating with the photo and, above it, the lettering “Sonic Youth LP”—the latest addition to the never-ending tradition of saluting, honoring, or parodying the now-defunct band’s album cover. Jelly.
Released in 1990, Jelly — Sonic Youth’s first album for Geffen Records’ DGC label, marking their entry into the majors — maintained the band’s connection to underground culture in multiple ways. For the cover, artist Raymond Pettibon, a friend of the band, provided a hand-drawn copy of an infamous mid-’60s photograph in England: a couple, Maureen Hindley and David Smith, on their way to testify at the trial of Hindley’s sister, Myra, and her lover, Ian Brady, accused of killing several children in what became known as the “Moorland Murders.”
“The entire text ‘I killed my parents and hit the road’ in this particular Pettibon drawing is what I initially reacted to when I was choosing images for Jelly”, says Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. RS. “The bold correlation between criminals hitting the road and a rock & roll band hitting the road seemed like a bold move at the time, plus there was a bit of Jack Kerouac-esque Beat literature in there with all the On the road pattern.”
As Moore and others recall, the first Jelly the tribute was likely Spooa 1991 single by Ohio indie band Prisonshake. Asked by their label to salute a familiar album cover for their own single, the band chose the barely a year old title Jelly“We liked the simplicity of the title, the black and white look and the line under the title that ends on the right,” says Prisonshake’s Robert Griffin. “It was unforgettable.” Echoing how the Residents defaced the cover of Meet the Beatles For one of their own records, drummer and artist Scott Pickering transformed Hindley and Smith into scary monsters.
Since then, parodies of Jelly have made it the Gen X version of the highly acclaimed Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Orchestra Or Abbey Road In memes and on T-shirts, Smith and Hadley have been replaced by a crazy mashup of different couples: Walter White and Jesse Pinkman from Break the bad; Snoop and Dr. Dre (“Chronic Youth”); Han Solo and Princess Leia; Bart Simpson and Milhouse Van Houten; Putin and Donald Trump (titled “Chronic Douche”); Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy (who at least ties in with the serial killer from the original); Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My cousin Vinny; even the Blues Brothers. A meme (with t-shirts) featuring Taylor Swift and a cat appeared in 2015. In 2018, Beyoncé was spotted wearing a t-shirt that mixed Pettibon’s illustration with Jay-Z’s.
“These memes take on a life of their own,” Pettibon says. RS“I hesitate to analyze it or make sense of it. Any attempt to do so would be futile, and why do it anyway? It might break the spell, interrupt the flow?”
For her contribution, Spanish artist Paula Garcia incorporated characters from Strange things“I wanted to parody that cover because of its iconic nature,” Garcia explains, “and because the ability to tell a story in text on the cover itself gave me the ability to better stage certain scenes from a television series.” Lewis also used an image of Steve Carell wearing sunglasses for a Goo/The Office crush.
“It’s like a movie still or a comic book panel, and you can put these two characters in there,” Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo says of the trend. “It speaks volumes about Raymond and his art, which has this devilish connotation. I don’t even know how much Sonic Youth has to do with it at this point. People have just applied it to so many different situations. It’s like folk art now.”
The associations aren’t always absurd or ridiculous. Growing up in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Nicole Aline Legault became a Sonic Youth fan in the ’90s. Unable to find merchandise from the band in her small town, she made her own. Jelly In 2020, Legault, then a multimedia artist in Montreal, was grappling with pandemic isolation and issues of systemic racism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I became much more aware of my privilege,” she says. “That information was so much at the forefront. It felt more intense.”
Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Prisonshake; Paula Garcia; Nicole Aline Legault; Paula Garcia
At the time, Legault was thinking about ways to honour the memory of Black medical worker Breonna Taylor and Oklahoma teenager Isaiah Lewis, both fatally shot by police. Coincidentally, the 30th anniversary of Jelly arrived in June. As Legault recalls: “I love this album and it was born on a whim. There was a click.”
She went out with herself Jelly Tribute, with drawings of Taylor and Lewis replacing Smith and Hindley, and the original text (“I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat and lightning. In one week, we killed my parents and hit the road”) replaced with “The police killed Breonna Taylor. The police killed Isaiah Lewis. It was all whirlwind, heat and lightning. No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace.” The image was so powerful that Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon tweeted it, and a company contacted Legault about selling T-shirts featuring the illustration. (Legault agreed only if the work was donated and all proceeds went to a GoFundMe fundraiser in Taylor’s memory and to help pay for a headstone for Lewis.)
Reflecting on both Legault’s and Putin/Kim Jong-un’s usage, Ranaldo says, “They can have this effect of being timely and political. They have a way of telling the news.”
Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, who oversees the band’s archives, estimates that “hundreds and hundreds” of Jelly There are now parodies—so many, in fact, that the group considered collecting them all in a coffee-table-style book.
But even 34 years later JellySonic Youth members admit to being somewhat disconcerted by the ongoing tributes. “I don’t think Raymond or Sonic Youth thought the image would be replicated to this extent,” Moore says. “Seeing demagogic clowns like Putin and Kim Jong-un come into the mainstream makes me groan, because I’d rather not give any energy to these warmongers. But like everything in our punk rock universe, nothing is sacred.”