Pleased to see my book made it into the hands of Raymond Pettibon.
"The artist who created the iconic cover graphic for Sonic Youth’s 1990 LP Goo is no stranger to memetic dissemination. Raymond Pettibon was an early provisional member of his brother Greg Ginn’s punk rock band, Black Flag17 and proposed the band name and logo simultaneously, a stylized black flag represented as four black bars.18
"If a white flag means surrender, a black flag represents anarchy,” he told author Steven Blush. “I was a card-carrying anarchist when I was fourteen. The Black Flag was a symbol of anarchy; depicting that as pistons seemed to have some visual power, plus convey the actual form of the flag.”19
In Los Angeles, the image would soon become almost as ubiquitous as the anarchy symbol. The group spray-painted the logo all over the city: on the side of buildings, alleys, sidewalks, the freeway underpass, and “the back of 16 wheelers.” Because of the simplicity of reproducing the logo, fans began to take up the mantle. Keith Morris - the first singer of the band20 - described it as an early form of tagging.
“We saw the logo before we heard the band,” said Henry Rollins, who would later join the group as front person. It would eventually become the subject of countless memes, many in the form of fan tattoos21.
In the spirit of Punk Rock DIY, Black Flag self-released all of their recordings on their own label, SST Records22, virtually all of them with Pettibon illustrations on the cover23. Like Vaughn Oliver at 4AD or Peter Saville24 at Factory Records, Pettibon’s deadpan comic album cover and flyer designs came to define the visual identity of SST.25”
- excerpt from My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes
