I grew up at a time when we still went to brick-and-mortar stores and purchased music recorded to peculiarly oversized and fragile grooved vinyl platters. In this primordial time, known as “the Album Era,” said platters were packaged within a protective cardboard cover and those covers were designed with artwork, sometimes quite spectacularly. Indeed, the album art was part of the whole sensory experience of both buying and listening to music. Who after all didn't try to identify all of the figures on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or play with the zipper on the front of Sticky Fingers, or ponder the meaning of the artwork for albums by Yes or King Crimson or Pink Floyd?
Rolling Stone, Billboard and NME all have their lists of “best” and/or “most beautiful” album art. My personal favorite is London Calling by The Clash, designed by Ray Lowry and featuring Pennie Smith's blurry photograph of bassist Paul Simonon smashing his instrument on-stage at the Palladium on 20 September 1979.
The artwork clearly appropriates that from Elvis Presley's debut album and the question has been the intent behind the appropriation: homage or insult? … continuation or discontinuity? … construction or destruction? Lowry has since described the design thus:
Most informed observers understand that it was a genuine homage to the original, unknown, inspired genius who created Elvis Presley’s first rock ‘n’ roll record and that it was not a calculated rip off. The obvious thing to do seemed to bring it all back home and make plain the obvious sources of all our insanities by dovetailing it into the grand design.
The “grand design.” The rootedness of punk in the rock and roll tradition of rebellion rather than the rootless hard break that many of us chose to read into it at the time. A clever reference, an intelligent commentary and an enduring piece of art. All in all, rather like The Clash themselves.
So, what's your favorite album art?
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