"Schlock" here used in the Yiddish-derived sense of "inferior or shoddy goods"
Oops, here's an earlier Hawkwind-related release one that isn't quite as eyeball-affronting
Topic for discussion - the decline of record cover artwork. Every time I open a streamer and check out "Suggested New Albums for You", my eyes are assaulted. It's across the board, from obscure artists to prestige ones, major labels to minor labels. I can't remember the last time I saw a truly surprising or even attractive record cover. It makes sense that in the age of streaming it would have declined as a point-of-sale factor but... there's still this thriving vinyl sub-market, there's still artists who grew up with the notion of the beautifully packaged record and presumably care about how their releases manifest as objects in the world.
These are today's offerings at Tidal
Beyond the question of the revolting artwork, the algorithm's ideas of what might appeal on a purely audio level seem misconceived.... I can't correlate these suggestions with my recent listening apart from the inclusion of an ECM title
postscript: added this Prince album covers graphic in reference to a comment
I feel like there is some recency bias here. A trip to a second-hand record store will confirm there were many, many, terrible album covers in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
ReplyDeleteThink how many great classic rock albums have terrible covers. All the Black Sabbath albums. Most of the Led Zeppelin albums, with the possible exceptions of Physical Graffiti and maybe IV. The Who. The tweeness of Roger Dean and the grisly forced punning of Hipgnosis. ELP. ELO.
How many album covers are there that really work as art? Not a lot. Beyond the usual suspects? Even fewer.
"Recency bias" - I like that concept. What discipline is that from? I'm not sure I've ever seen the noun form of "recent"
DeleteI like the Sabbath covers up to Sabotage! Just today I was looking at Master of Reality as it happens. Led Zep - the only one I think of as not nice looking is In Through the Out Door. Even when the contents are duff, like Presence, the cover is cool.
Yeah there's always been shit album covers but it's the sort of can't-be-arsed, possibly-delegated-to-AI quality of the preponderance of the artwork today that is striking. Even "tossed off" is too active a term to describe it.
The pretentious stuff of yore e.g. Roger Dean was at least effortfully so.
The difference would actually relate to a Yiddish-y thing again - the difference between kitsch and schlock.
You don't like Hipgnosis?!
Recency bias comes from behavioral economics and psychology. As the name suggests, it’s the tendency to overvalue observations because they are recent. One example would be investors assuming that interest rates will stay close to 1% because that’s where they were for the previous decade, even though they have been 15% within living memory and could easily get back there again. Another would be NME writers picking Swordfishtrombones as the sixth best album of all time in 1985.
DeleteHipgnosis is an example of the worst kind of post-hippy capitalism, I think. They had one or two hits, I will admit. Electric Warrior is amazing, and Dark Side of the Moon is one of the very few album covers that deserves that overused epithet, “iconic”. But their work from the late 70s on became increasingly tired and formulaic. When Yes traded Roger Dean whimsy - which as you say at least looked as though some effort had gone into it - for stale ideas and lame puns from Hipgnosis, it was a sure sign they were finished. IIRC they went back to Dean for their late career New Wave-inflected return to form, Drama.
So you are telling me that a decade into their existence, Hipgnosis went stale?
DeleteI suppose one measure of whether cool album art is a thing still is whether we can name any names from today that are equivalently known like Hipgnosis and Roger Dean, or for that matter Peter Saville or Malcolm Garrett, were in their heydays.... I can't. But that may just be because I'm not following either album graphic art or music like I once did....
Still I don't feel I've noticed anyone talking about a new record cover designer, or a label with a look, or raving about a particular distinctive cover. But again that could the same syndrome (which is possibly the opposite of recency-bias now I think about it)
It does seem to have been devalued in the scheme of things for bunch of fairly obvious reasons
Actually I see that kitsch is actually a German word.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Yiddish is nearly German, isn't it?
"Sign O' the Times" excepted, Prince's album covers were usually pretty awful. Radiohead as well. Even before he became persona non grata, Kanye's covers ("My Beautiful Dark..." and "Life of Pablo") were exhibiting some strange artistic choices. Finally, the cover of "Pet Sounds" doesn't tend to scream "genre defining masterpiece" (I also tend to think the cover for the Beatles "Revolver" is pretty naff, but I seem to be in the minority here.).
ReplyDeleteThe covers of both the Stone Roses' debut and 'The Second Coming" very accurately reflect their contents.
An interesting exercise is to think of awful albums with brilliantly, stylish covers; "Rattle & Hum" springs especially to mind (U2 always took great care about cover art).
This raises the broader question of what the last truly iconic album cover was? "Nevermind", maybe?
Haha I was about to mention Dirty Mind as one of my all-time favorites. Just an unbelievably defiant and provocative move. I do agree about the others, though, including SOTT.
DeleteLooking to disprove your point about Prince, I happened to chance on some kind of graphic that contains all of his album covers ever... and I'll tell you what, the ones after Batman are increasingly godawful which reinforces my point if anything. Really cheap and nasty looking.
DeleteDirty Mind is great iconic stuff... 1999 is great, Controversy is pretty good, okay I grant you Purple Rain is tacky, Around the World In a Day is i think striking and does convey the contents / music direction quite well... Parade, well I think that's a bit overrated, seems very mid-80s and sort of George Michael-y (unimpressed by the album as well).... Sign is awesome, Lovesexy is cheeky-saucy and very very Prince. No I wouldn't say "pretty awful" is the word I'd use for Prince album art in his heyday.
Nevermind is definitely iconic and steeped in appropriate symbolism but as an actual image it's kind of ugly I think.
DeleteGreat covers misleadingly encasing poor records is a great subject to ponder... I anticipate sense several hours of my life disappearing into that one
Delete"Great Covers -awful music" - some of the later era Pink Floyd should head the list.
DeleteRegarding excellent covers, Miles Davis also needs a shout out - Sketches of Spain, Tribute to Jack Johnson, Kind of Blue, Birth of the Cool and, of course, the iconic Bitches Brew...ironically, one of his most pivotal works (On the Corner) has a truly awful cover.
Wow, your taste is very different from mine - love the On the Corner cover (it continues on the back over too)
DeleteBut yeah Miles records are nearly all great looking - until we get to the 1980s.
His designers are helped a lot by him being the most handsome man in music.
With the possible exception only of Hugh Mundell.
Always thought Hipgnosis threw shit at the wall and saw what stuck. Some great covers (their best is Ummagumma, imho), but lots of absolutely terrible ones, such as Parachute by the Pretty Things (their worst, imho). Who did the Groundhogs covers? They were all pretty good.
DeleteSkinny Puppy went on a very odd arc, where their covers went from gothic and elegantly sinister to absolute visual vomit.
Which makes me think how often a fall in cover quality also marks an artistic falling away. Not just the cover art, but in the cheapness of the packaging, the sudden absence of an inner sleeve, the thinness of the vinyl. This often accompanies a change in record label, of course. I've experienced this a few times, although the only example I can think of off the top of my head is Live Skull.
Pet Sounds is sort of the last of the obligatory, last-second, label-originated covers that predominated in pop before the mid-60s - had it been released on schedule, Frank Holmes' art for Smile (which extended to a 12-page inner booklet, printed with the sleeve and ready to go for when it was finished, which as it happened took 38 years) would've been the break
DeleteAnother good place to look for great covers with awful music is labels that have a strong visual style that they use for their star performers and also-rans alike. Factory, 4AD, ZTT. Joy Division’s Still is a motley collection of outtakes and a badly-recorded live album, packaged with Peter Savile’s trademark sombre elegance. Trompe Le Monde captures the Pixies well past their best, but still gets an eye-catching Vaughan Oliver cover. Slave to the Rhythm uses one of the most memorable images of the 80s for its cover. But the album underneath is uninspired - a single idea stretched out for 43 minutes - and a sad drop-off from the brilliance of the great Compass Point trilogy, Warm Leatherette / Nightclubbing / Living my Life
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Factory (well, technically, post-Factory), New Order's "Republic", is in the great cover/mediocre music category.
ReplyDeleteI also quite like the cover for Aphex's "Drukqs"; the contents not so much.
In terms of covers reflecting the artist, Michael Jackson's album covers during the 90s, mirror his unravelling during that decade. The absurd, baroque cartoon of 91's "Dangerous", gives way to the monstrous Stalinist statues of "HIStory". 1997's remix album "Blood on the Dancefloor", meanwhile, has arguably the worst album cover by a major artist in recent memory.
Oh actually I’ve got the all-time winner on this one: Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell. I was absolutely obsessed with that record cover as a child, and was certain that the album would be the most terrifying Metal ever recorded. When I finally got to hear it, I was just not prepared for the warmed-over Broadway Springsteen pastiche that it turned out to be.
ReplyDeleteAs a Steinman fan, I resemble that remark. Richard Corben (the actual artist) is a superficially odd fit for it but perfect on a deeper level, since he's simply a cartoonist who works in photorealistic rendering - slapstick Frazetta
DeleteThe influx of AI-collated glurge is the final nail, but for at least a decade and a half, album art has been dominated by stock photos and bad typography - which arguably goes back to the CD switchover and the more or less simultaneous introduction of Photoshop and 'desktop publishing' aesthetics
ReplyDelete