Unknown Pleasures

Submission 15,451

About

Unknown Pleasures is the debut album by post-punk band Joy Division. The album's cover, designed by Peter Saville, became an iconic image and an exploitable in online music culture and a ubiquitous t-shirt design, to the point where people joked the cover was more well-known than the album itself.

Origin

Joy Division released Unknown Pleasures on June 15th, 1979.^[1] The cover was designed by Peter Saville (shown below). The cover is based on an image of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919. Saville reversed the original image from black-on-white to white-on-black.

Spread

The cover became common on shirt designs, to the point where its ubiquity began seeing parodies in the early 2010s. Disney briefly released a shirt which superimposed the icon of Mickey Mouse on the cover in January of 2012 (shown below, left) to the chagrin of Joy Division bassist Peter Hook, now of New Order.^[2] The shirts were quickly taken off the market.^[3] On May 21st, 2013, Laughing Squid^[4] posted about a parody of the shirt created by Adam Kurtz which featured the logo and the text "What is this? I've seen it on Tumblr" (shown below, right).

The same day, Buzzfeed^[5] posted a listicle of exploitables made with the design (examples shown below). A single-topic blog devoted to showing pictures of people wearing Joy Division shirts was created.^[6] Wattpad^[7] posted a satirical article about people wearing Joy Division shirts only for fashion and not love of the music.

In more recent years, the logo has been used with unrelated text and memes. For example, memes using the cover have been made with Michael Flynn's Redacted Russian Investigation Memo (shown below, left) and Pee Is Stored In the Balls (shown below, right).