the history of album art

Never judge an album by its cover. Wait a minute, that’s not how the saying goes. So, when it comes to literature, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, right? Got it. So why can’t we say the same about music? Years ago, the music industry made itself at home behind enemy lines. That is to say, if “visual art” is married to drawing, colour, sculpture, etc., then music is the mistress. How else could you explain MTV to an invading alien race? Sure, music at its core is all about creating sonic sensations that satisfy the soul. But let’s be honest, sometimes what you see leaves a greater impact than what you hear — no matter the context. This is why an old roommate of mine took me for an infant defiler after I left a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind on my desk. This is why referring to Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You as a “stripped-down” LP as a quirky little quip works despite the lack of acoustics on the record.

So long as it stays within a square, an artist can say pretty much whatever they want to on their album … before anyone hears their song. Take My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless for example. On the cover is an odd-angled photograph of a guitar that is so heavily filtered, discoloured, and altered that it becomes something else entirely. The viewer might not recognise the image as a guitar upon first glance, but they recognise it is something ethereal. Much like the album that defined the shoegaze genre itself, it is a radiant, delicate, blissfully confused sonic wonder. When you feel warmed by the fuzz-distortion and reverb emanating through the cardboard sleeve or Spotify screen before you even press play, the authority of the album cover has announced its resounding presence.

But enough references to the ‘90s.. Just about every aspect of the current state of music raises the question: how in the hell did it come to this? Album covers are no exception. If Twenty One Pilots think their colour schemes make them cryptic and unique, they’ve obviously never heard of the Beatles, which is coincidentally where our story sprouts. But we’re not here to talk about the white album. No, in fact in terms of sleeve design, another Beatles classic, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is the polar opposite of its successor. Come to think of it, this album’s cover was entirely unlike anything that came before it as well — Beatles or beyond. It was the landmark release that has defined the terms of cover art as we know them today.

Before Sgt. Pepper’s release in 1967, album covers were fairly tame. Vinyl records were slipped into brown paper fittings that served more to protect the album than to characterise it. However, music is a commodity, and in the late 1930s record companies started to think of its packaging as a blank canvas. “Album art” is born, and it immediately takes off. The public eats the colourful new covers up. The idea of having a tangible vestige of an album’s creator to take home was an enchanting novelty. It’s similar to how every thirteen year old felt scrolling through Niall Horan’s Instagram page — before the great One Direction iconoclasm of 2016, of course. Naturally, “personality shots” (i.e. physical photographs of the band’s members) became the most popular embellishment in the early days of sleeve decoration. Then they got boring fast. Lots of smiling white faces, three-piece suits, and snapping fingers — looking at you, Buddy Holly. Kudos to Elvis Presley for introducing all the lovely ladies outside the record store window to the primal ecstasy of rock’n’roll in 1956 by thinly veiling his polarising “Elvis Pelvis” grayscale photo behind a colourful funhouse font (the Clash would later repurpose Presley’s self-titled debut for the cover of London Calling). And as it turns out, four lads from Liverpool were listening and looking on as well.

As the god-like repertoire of the Fab Four grew to unheralded proportions during the early-to-mid ‘60s, so too did their commercial value. They satirically titled their fourth album Beatles for Sale, after all. With every new release, this band generated seismic shifts across the entire musical landscape, and with the release of Sgt. Pepper, this idea of a band’s unrivaled status as the pulse of all pop-culture manifested itself upon an album cover like never before. With this cover, the Beatles found a way to yet again raise the bar and set themselves apart from their peers. A cover so iconic, it almost didn’t even matter that one of the most legendary pieces of music ever recorded was on the inside.

Deification isn’t free, though. At the time, Sgt. Pepper’s cover was the most expensive ever produced.. The band’s four members stand stoically in their brightly coloured, old-school military garb. Behind them, an ensemble of faces, presumably the band’s interests and influences. Among this cast of characters are child stars, prize fighters, intellectual gurus, and even fellow musicians — including younger portraits of the Beatles themselves. The album immediately engages the observer who tries to identify each of the 58 cultural icons featured on the cover. The cast of characters was handpicked by the albums designers Peter Blake and Jaan Haworth, along with band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. The cultural cross-section includes the likes of Karl Marx, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, and Sonny Liston, to name a few. Additionally, the cover also features portraits of the Beatles in their younger years. The existential commentary within this work runs deep, as the band deconstructs the arbitrary nature of social distinction, challenges the past, and sets out to dictate the future. Not to mention, it’s a whole lot of fun to look at. It was also the first album to include song lyrics on the outside packaging, using the back cover as a place for listeners to either sing along or further ponder the intellectual merit of the project.

After Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, critics and casual fans alike could not shut up about the controversial cover. Recording artists no longer viewed the record sleeve as merely a marketing tool. The Beatles proved that the aesthetic component of music speaks just as loudly as the music itself in an artistic sense. And in the late ’60s and early ’70s musical content started to become increasingly expressive of sentimental ideas, moving away from more shallow pop songs about love when drug-abusive culture permeated the mainstream – another movement in which the Beatles took the lead. Prolific poetic lyricists as well, like Bob Dylan, were responsible for making music more emotionally personable. As a result, album covers became visual symbols of identity for fans. Merchandisers provided them the opportunity to literally wear their heart on their sleeve as album art tee shirts rose to popularity.

Enter post-punk pioneers, Joy Division. This band’s run was short lived; they formed after attending an infamous Sex Pistols gig in Manchester in 1976. Four years and just two full-length albums later, they were gone following the suicide of singer Ian Curtis. The surviving members would go on to form the legendary synth-pop group New Order, who boast some solid album covers in their own catalogue. But the band had already been immortalised, thanks to their debut effort with Joy Division, “Unknown Pleasures.” Tonally, the album played around with using the bass as lead melodic guitar — creating a droning despondency that would come to define the post-punk genre. Six-strings were sprinkled in where necessary to elevate the composition and pay homage to the punky punch of the album’s ultimate influences. Four decades later, fans of Unknown Pleasures are haunted by Curtis’ ghastly croons.

What really resonates about the album today though is all those damn shirts. Hell, I’m wearing one right now while I write about it. During the recording of Unknown Pleasures, the band struggled over how they wanted to design the sleeve. Naturally, they turned to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy for inspiration. This is where they struck gold in an image of the first recorded radio waves from a pulsar circa 1919. The fragile lines rise, fall, and overlap to form what almost looks like a cluster of two-dimensional mountains crawling over each other to get off the page. Erratic, yet natural; factory records’ resident designer Peter Saville simply inverted the colours to feature a black background and white lines, and the rest is history. This eerie image somehow still feels like the closest we’ll ever come to understanding the truth behind the music inside and by extension the complexities of a young man in Curtis, who’s will to live we can hear fleeting with every line.

It didn’t happen immediately, but the legend of Joy Division and the memory of Curtis gradually accumulated popularity — alongside New Order’s music — throughout the ’80s. By the latter half of the decade the stage was set, thanks to a surging fashion trend known as the graphic band tee. Unknown Pleasures shirts, simply black crew-neck tees featuring the album’s artwork, were gone as soon as they hit the shelves. A new batch was printed, but that didn’t last long either. As the years went on, the sales figures proved to be no fluke. The success of the shirts has catapulted the status of the album it depicts into an entirely new realm. Designer brands such as Raf Simons and Supreme each released Joy Division themed collections in the early 2000s. Now, most fans of late ’70s post-punk, even during the post-punk revival at the turn of the century, typically wouldn’t wear designer clothes. It didn’t matter, these collections still sold in staggering numbers across all demographics.

Joy Division produced a critically acclaimed masterpiece within post-punk. But let’s be honest, post-punk is but one of many semi-obsolete subgenres of rock, with a modest following at best. The shirts shouldn’t be so popular given Joy Division’s fanbase, yet they are. Why? Simply put, the album cover is cool. From the most devout followers of Joy Division to those that have never even heard of the band and everything in between, I have seen them all don the fabled shirts. For fans, it’s a matter self-identification. For others, it’s simply an edgy congregation of scribble-scrabbled lines that evokes the “too cool to care” attitude; this is alternative culture 101. The unifying factor is that Unknown Pleasures is uniquely minimalistic in sound and especially in style. It says so much without showing much more than a few horizontal lines bent out of shape in black and white. The shirt is a mystery and those wearing it are begging to have it solved, to feel different or interesting, even if they don’t listen to the music. They are literally covering themselves in bare-boned brilliance without cheapening the legacy of the record itself. In truth, the album cover and the music itself are mirror images of one another: imaginative, ground-breaking, enigmatic. It is a perfect example of symbiosis between sonic and visual art, so who cares if a buck or two is to be made from fake fans on the side?

In certain cases, an album — or even an entire band — might owe its stardom to the design on a record’s sleeve, even if it isn’t mutually beneficial. Such is the case of The Velvet Underground & Nico. This self-titled, collaborative output didn’t sell many copies in its day. But it is now considered one of the most influential albums ever made. In fact, it is rumored that among the few that did purchase this album upon its release in 1967, all were inspired to start a band of their own. I’m willing to bet, though, that of those lucky few that did stumble upon this record in its heyday, most of them were only convinced to buy it because they recognised the image on the sleeve.

It began with a bang, sort of. New York icon and godfather of pop art Andy Warhol needed an act for his Exploding Plastic Inevitable: a series of drug-induced mergers of all things art. Although Jim Morrison of the Doors frequented these events, a mainstream act would not suffice. Warhol wanted something really weird. Were you surprised? Anyway, he eventually settled on a little-known local avant-garde group known as The Velvet Underground, fronted by Lou Reed and stylistically driven by the classically trained John Cale. Between 1966 and 1967, the Velvets played to the ears of Warhol’s New York elite until they finally decided to record an album. Studio time was expensive in the late ’60s, and The Velvet Underground were strapped for cash. Naturally, they asked the rich and famous artist by whom they were employed to fund the project. Vehemently, Warhol agreed — he had grown to like his in-house band — but not without conditions. First, he recruited German model Nico to join the band as a female vocalist alongside Reed, despite Reed’s wishes. Second, Warhol wanted to design the cover. To this, there were no objections. Welcome to using album art as a marketing tool: exhibit A.

However, the record was made and released to relatively little fanfare. The album’s cover was another story. Like Unknown Pleasures, The Velvet Underground & Nico’s sleeve featured a minimalist design: white background with the image of a rotting banana front and center, in Warhol’s signature style. To complete the setup the name “Andy Warhol” is scripted along the lower right-hand corner. Nowhere on the front cover do the name of the band or the album appear. When I first showed this album to my sister her response was unforgettable: “that jackass really made an album?” The back and inside covers show a little more gratitude to those that actually produced the album with black and white photographs of band members in the studio … as well as a picture of Warhol looking through a tambourine front and center, for good measure.

The banana became one of Warhol’s most recognised works. Meanwhile, the fledgling Velvet Underground struggled for mainstream recognition. After the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, Reed and company parted with both Nico and Warhol. They had made enough to fund a second album, and chose to do so without the authoritative presence of the larger-than-life artist. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable came to an end. Meanwhile, the Velvets recorded three more albums before disbanding in 1970, each of which are today considered masterful in their own right, albeit to a slightly lesser degree than their debut under Warhol.

I have a shirt for this album too, and I must say it is quite the conversation starter. Obviously, it is called pop art for a reason. While it took nearly 30 years for The Velvet Underground & Nico to attain the notoriety it deserves among rock critics, it still has not escaped the colossal shadow of the image that graces its cover. Even with their revolutionary sound that fused Avant Garde with ’60s rock’n’roll, essentially inventing alternative rock as we know it in all forms in the process (yes, they were that influential), The Velvet Underground & Nico is still colloquially referred to as “The Banana album” or “The Andy Warhol album” signaling the power visual art can hold over music if it is allowed to go unchecked. The band thought they could deploy Warhol’s massive wealth and influence to promote their project. Instead, the reverse happened, and Warhol was able to propel his own artistic vision into an entirely new medium and appeal to a different industry, using The Velvet Underground as a sort of ploy. Still, it’s hard to imagine the band would have ever caught on with the mainstream without Warhol, and it’s impossible even now to untie the legacies of the two artists, for better or for worse. While they might not have carried equal weight in propelling one another to recognition, the visual and sonic components of The Velvet Underground & Nico proudly stand the test of time together as a prime example of awe-inspiring artistic expression across multiple media wrapped up within a single project: exactly how Warhol planned his Exploding Plastic Inevitable to turn out, I’m sure.

But enough about antiquated albums, right? You’ve got a point, so let me bring you up to speed. The rise of digital media didn’t quite overhaul the visual side of music in the same way it changed the primary audible mode of consumption for music time and time again. People didn’t trudge to a record store to pick up physical copies anymore, but still most downloading and streaming platforms put cover designs front and center. In fact, when Apple launched Apple music in 2015, a big point of emphasis in creating the interface layout was the album cover. The company made sure these images couldn’t be avoided. They are huge, clear, and centrally located. Spotify have already been using a similar layout for years, and still do today. Thanks to the vast libraries of such platforms, users can access and interact with large quantities of album covers at the touch of a button. It isn’t necessarily tangible, but the potential for observation and securitization of designs is unprecedented.

Speaking of design, it too has seen immense change in the years since Unknown Pleasures was released in 1979. In the ‘80s, there was everything  from Bruce Springsteen’s ass in a pair of frayed blue jeans to Michael Jackson’s oft-parodied lean and crisp white suit on the seismic Thriller. You name it, some ’80s album probably has it on the cover. Oh, and there were a lot of flowers. Then in the ‘90s, things became rather grotesque and downright weird. See the demented, bulbous eyeballoids on Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde or the self-immolation of a Vietnamese monk on Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled for reference. During this decade, abstraction became the norm, and sleeve designs saw heavy experimentation with computer generated images. The results were about what you’d expect. A little unsettling but still somehow tells you everything you need to know about ’90s pop culture. The cover and similarly off-putting music video for Eiffel 65’s single Blue (Da Ba Dee) are a perfect example. Those little blue aliens are something to behold.

Clearly change has been the only constant over the extensive history of album art, and the 21st century has been no exception. But it’s not quite what you’d expect. As soon as the post-punk revival and pop-punk surge of the early aughts took their dying breaths, rock and its subsidiaries’ days atop the heap were numbered. Hip hop had been on the rise since the late ’80s, and its merger with dance pop proved to be the fatal blow of that good ole time rock’n’roll. This coup d’état atop the charts was not without consequence for album covers.

In the last decade or two, we’ve seen a return to the pre-Sgt. Pepper “personality covers,” but with a modern twist. While self-indulgence has always been embedded in hit music, there seems to be a boatsful nature innate to hip-hop and pop that rock hasn’t really been able to replicate. Nice try, hair metal. In other words, music of the 21st century has made it cool to like what you see in the mirror once again. And that’s good news if you happen to be incredibly photogenic like Taylor Swift or the Weekend. Why dig through a dusty old encyclopedia for hours on end looking for a cover shot when you can just snap a selfie and call it a day? But these are not your standard Buddy Holly snoozer sleeves of old either. Photoshop saves the day! Just take a look at Lady Gaga’s screeching off-coloured bust between the handlebars of a shimmering chopper on Born This Way to get the idea. A personality cover that actually has personality … who would have thought? Not Buddy Holly.

Not everything is as self-centered as it seems though. Because artists of today fully grasp the concept that they themselves are not the personality addressed in the music. Let’s examine Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. There are plenty of personalities on that cover, none of which are Lamar himself. The reason the grayscale portrait upon the White House lawn works so well is because Lamar is embracing the fact that the story of To Pimp a Butterfly is not his alone to tell (yes, I know the lyrics to the lead single i, that’s beside the point). With this cover Lamar effortlessly anoints himself the voice of a generation. The group depicted on the cover demands a word with those who dare to slap on a pair of headphones and listen. You can sure as hell count me in.

When I was home over the summer, I overheard a conversation between two friends. One proclaimed to the other that he’d read an article hypothesising that every single unique song melody will have theoretically been recorded in one way or another by the year 2030. I haven’t the slightest idea how on Earth one would go about quantifying such a metric, but it got me thinking: could we really be running out of music? This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Anyway, true or untrue, I can at least console myself in the idea that even if all the music sounds the same, nothing can hinder the evolution of album art. Experimenting with new mediums, forays into abstract concepts, or simply reimagining the classics; with every new album drop comes something new — at least on the sleeve. “Never judge a book or album by its cover,” we’ve heard it all before. Maybe the appropriate thing to say should be “never judge a cover by its album,” because each one sure seems to have a hell of a lot to say for itself.