Goo Memes

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200

My book from last year about my second favorite meme (after Ikea Monkey): variations on Raymond Pettibon’s cover for Sonic Youth’s major label debut, Goo. 

The versatility and timelessness of the image (it instantly evokes a buddy film, a road movie, rebellion, escape, etc.) makes it perfectly suited to address contemporary social problems, like Covid, Trump, Transphobia, the murder of George Floyd, and now the murder of Rebecca Good. The second image above has been making the rounds on social media and was reposted today by SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo. 

My Friend Goo

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

Raymond Pettibon | Bottomless Pond

Raymond Pettibon

Bottomless Pond 

Lawndale, USA: SST Publications, 1986

[unpaginated], 22 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

An early zine that intersperses Raymond Pettibon’s drawings with those of the artist’s young nephew. Nelson Tarpenny is credited with contributing to other publications by Pettibon, though none so overtly. A quick Google search for Tarpenny turned up no information, beyond auction results for these collaborations. 

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon turns 68 today. 

My book on his album cover for Sonic Youth’s Goo and the subsequent memes, is available from the publisher, here. 

Dave Dyment | My Friend Goo

Dave Dyment

My Friend Goo

Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025

38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound

Edition of 200

Astutely recognizing that the subject matter touched on a number of my interests1, Paul Van Kooy commissioned me to write a text about Raymond Pettibon’s cover for Sonic Youth’s Goo LP and the subsequent hundreds of memes it has inspired. We amassed over a hundred of them, most of which appear in this little publication, and I wrote a text that attempts to make sense of them. 

It traces the way a Moors Murders paparazzi photo became a Raymond Pettibon drawing, then a cover for Sonic Youth’s major label debut and then a template for people to address subjects as varied as companionship, fandom, escape, corruption, trans rights, police killings, threats to democracy around the world, Covid19, and countless other contemporary concerns. 

The book is designed by Emma Wright (who designed Roula’s fantastic Index), features a cover illustration by Leanne Shapton2 and comes with a bookmark by Jonathan Monk3.

Thanks, of course, to Paul, Wendy, Emma, Leanne, Jonathan, Lee, and Roula. And special thanks to Annie Koyama for making this (and so many other things) possible.

The book is available from the publisher, here. 

1. Sonic Youth, Raymond Pettibon, album covers by artists, the ways that culture takes shape, etc.

2. Leanne Shapton is an artist, art director and publisher. She has designed lettering for the covers of two  Chuck Palahniuk novels and the credits of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. She also created the "armpit sex drawing" for Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her.

3. The first hundred copies include a bookmark made from a receipt drawing with an illustration of another SY album cover, Daydream Nation (see next post). 

"A wonderful look into not just our mashup but the whole history of them. I loved the historical antecedents - and the footnotes are as good a read as the text! Really wonderful to have this text about (or, in reference to) our album cover and Ray’s drawing.”

- Lee Ranaldo

Accordion-Fold Artists’ Books

Leporellos by Kiki Smith, Kay Rosen, Nancy Karp, Emmett Williams, Diane Borsato, Raymond Pettibon, Miranda Maher, Robert Morris, Peter E. Clarke, Dave Dyment, Athena Tacha, Dennis Oppenheim, Hansjörg Mayer, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Lucio Fontana. 

Raymond Pettibon | Tripping Corpse 6

Raymond Pettibon

Tripping Corpse 6

Lawndale, USA: SST Publications, 1985

28 pp., 21.6 x 14 x 0.2 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 500 numbered copies

Between the years 1981 and 1985, Raymond Pettibon produced six issues of Tripping Corpse, this being the final. The ‘zines were published by Pettibon’s older brother Greg Ginn, best known as the leader of the band Black Flag. 

Tripping Corpse included art, poetry, politics and band interviews and reviews. Number six features interviews with Keb Studerbox and Sonic Youth, an album review and drawings on 24 of the 28 pages. 

Reportedly, 400 copies of 500 produced were destroyed, making the title scarce. It has an estimated value of between three and five hundred dollars US. 

Raymond Pettibon

A selection of 'zines by Raymond Pettibon, who turns 67 today. 

Minutemen/Raymond Pettibon | Bean-Spill

Minutemen 

Bean-Spill 

Los Angeles, USA: Thermidor Records, 1982

7” vinyl

Edition size unknown

I’ve been doing research for a text about Raymond Pettibon and discovered this obscurity in the MoMA library collection. It’s the third EP and fourth release overall by American hardcore punk band Minutemen. 

Early pressings featured a B-side label reproduction of a Raymond Pettibon drawing of a naked man with an erect penis, the spindle hole of the seven inch becoming his asshole. The parenthetical caption below reads “(We need the money).”

Minutemen were the second release on SST records, the label formed to release Black Flag records. It also featured a cover graphic by Pettibon. 

When Henry Rollins joined Black Flag as front person in 1981, he requested a "fuck you" middle finger illustration from Pettibon, for the song "My Rules." The artist’s response was to produce a drawing of a lackadaisical and effete finger (see below). 

“Don’t tell Ray what to do,” Rollins realized, "You'll notice there's a solid year of Black Flag flyers where it's nothing but erect penises."

Pettibon told Time Out in 2017:  “My brother was in Black Flag, and they were very good at self-promotion. I actually used my existing drawings for the posters and other stuff I did for them and eventually for Sonic Youth. I always drew what I wanted; I never listened to any bright ideas coming from punk rockers.”