I later learned that the “control” Nirvana had did not extend to places in the world where they ignored contracts. In a 2018 piece for Discogs, Ben Blackwell described acquiring a Saudi Arabian cassette of In Utero “that completely censored the musculature of the female body depicted on the front cover, almost as if to partially appropriate the chador worn by some Muslim women . . . the face, arms, feet and wings were exposed, but everything in between was blacked out.” Blackwell also found a Saudi cassette of Nevermind in which the local label had airbrushed a white diaper over the baby’s
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