Behind Blink-182’s Suggestive ‘Enema of the State’ Album Cover

There’s perhaps no more memorable album cover from the 1990s pop-punk scene than Blink-182’s Enema of the State.

The eye-grabbing album cover features a beautiful woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit, complete with a hat bearing a red cross symbol. The model looks alluringly at the camera as she suggestively snaps a blue glove over her right hand, a blue butterfly tattoo visible underneath. The white lab coat she’s wearing displays the Blink-182 logo with a red bra peeking through.

The woman on the famous cover is Janine Lindemulder, a nude model who used to work in the adult film industry and as an exotic dancer. But that’s a fact that bandmates Travis Barker, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge were unaware of when they picked her picture out of a pile of photos of potential female models for the cover. Album producer Jerry Finn is the one who informed them of Lindemulder’s profession.

“You know what’s funny? They didn’t even know who Janine was,” Finn told Entertainment Weekly in 2000. “It was me who told them that was Janine from the porno movies. So it’s kind of funny that they’ve been lumped in with Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, who play up that kind of pimp lifestyle because Blink is so not that.”

“I kind of see ’em as my kid brothers,” Lindemulder said. “The first time we met, they were very curious about the adult industry, and they wanted to know the inside scoop on making movies. They’re like little boys, just curious.”

The concept for the cover – as well as the photo on the back that shows the band members in a surgical room wearing nothing but boxer shorts while Lindemulder is dressed in a white nurse’s outfit with knee-high white stockings and red high heels – came from the mind of photographer David Goldman.

“Up until the very last minute, the album was going to be called Turn Your Head and Cough, and that’s why I came up with the idea of the glove,” Goldman explained to The Huffington Post. “Obviously an enema is not really a glove type of thing. I thought it was a good visual.”

But the visual Goldman came up with stemmed from the band’s artistic vision. “We wanted to have a sexy nurse on the cover,” guitarist Hoppus told CMJ New Music Monthly in 1999. “We were looking at models and Playboy girls and we were like, ‘If we’re going to get a sexy girl for the cover, let’s get a Vivid girl!’”

Enema offered a trio of hits, “What’s My Age Again,” “All the Small Things” and “Adam’s Song.” All three reached either the No. 1 or No. 2 spot on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, while “Small Things” cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album itself hit No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and helped propel Blink-182 to become one of the biggest pop-punk bands of all time.

Photo by Jerod Harris/WireImage