Thursday 11 July 2013

Off The Record

It doesn't seem a coincidence that album art of the 70s so often recalls the wax dioramas of 19th century metropolitan low art later appropriated by Surrealism. The air of stilted bourgeois drama that hangs around the form at its most stagey - Dali, Paul Delvaux, the sculptures of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition - resurfaces in the gestures of a form caught between the glistening pleasures of international business (which rock had long since become a part of) & the now antiquarian memory of wrenching sexual & material alienation (that survived, coelocanth-like, in the likes of the Knack & Dr. Feelgood). (The radical strangeness of the dioramas, incidentally, would be picked up primarily by Walter Benjamin, who devotes part of The Arcades Project to them, & Hollywood's B-industry, responsible for 1953 Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax, whence it fed into the likes of Alice Cooper & The Dictators.) The climate of many of these covers, curiously composed, simultaneously frozen & charged, hinting at non-existent mystery, seems of a piece with the LP's ongoing role as spliff-rolling surface. They provide the appearance of spurious depth whose spuriousness they self-consciously proclaim. They appear to us now as the sexual climate of the fin de siecle appeared to the 1970s - the emphasis on tits, arses & male impotence in particular is quite peculiar; the general air, particularly of Hipgnosis' many covers, quite explicitly recalls Moreau, Watts & Alfred Moore.

11 comments:

Greyhoos said...

Ahem. To walk into any mall-anchored chain record back in the day meant being bombarded with this sort of thing before you even started thumbing through the bins. I can think of dozen of album covers from that time that could be added to this post. Blame it on the marketing department; which was a bureaucratically other entity that ran by it's own logic. "Smell the Glove," anyone?

But props for including a 10cc album, because their albums were standard-bearers among the ugliest and most uninviting sleeve art of the decade.

If the Cars signed off on having a Vargas on the cover -- well, they already sounded like a cheap imitation of Roxy Music, so...

Culla said...

some dodgy classics in there - the female body was much more fair game then. bourgeois milieus as they were imagined to be, not the stuffy places of drudgery they usually were/are

carl said...

Excellent stuff! My own personal fave is Patto's Below the Belt cover, actually even more offensive in reality than the mythical "smell the glove".

Bobby's Dream said...

Re Boxer's Below the Belt - the 'censored' version is less offensive then the 'uncensored' version. Although the boxing glove ostensibly hides the model's 'modesty'it renders the whole thing even more grim and misogynistic. Quite a feat they pulled off there! Presumably pulling off was the intention...

dboon147 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
dboon147 said...

There were a couple I didn't include out of displeasure that are almost as bad as that Boxer cover: http://991.com/newgallery/Silverhead-16-And-Savaged-445198.jpg, http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8302/7891427548_fb07d79bf5_z.jpg (should be noted it's obvious from the front cover the girls are vastly underage), http://soundofmusic2000.up.seesaa.net/image/IMG_8122.jpg (there was apparently a picture disc version of this), http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4089/4982839063_a1917a2619.jpg etc

(Sorry about the non-links above, been years since I last used blogger)

carl said...

The horrible UFO "Force it" cover models are apparentely Genesis P Orridge and Cosey (though I am sure you all knew this anyway)

William said...


I blame now forgotten British pop artist Allen Jones. Far more influential than Peter Blake or Warhol:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Allen+Jones&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=zO3fUYDHK8u07QbG04HgBA&biw=1342&bih=1022&sei=0e3fUcC2Cuyt7Qal8oDIBw

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

wot no mention of Scorpions's Lovedrive?

http://www.strangeoldepictures.com/content/item/105805.html

Sniff & The Tears, the most innocuous soft rock group, had some dodgy covers and full page adverts in the music press

this one
http://bizarrerecords.com/wordpress/2011/first-and-only-use-of-sniffn-in-a-band-name/

is just cheesy but i'm sure i can remember one where a girl is trying to shut the door, in vain, on an intruder

so many dodgy, dodgy, creepy, nasty adverts in the 70s and early 80s music papers i've got

seem to remember at NME there was some kind of cafuffle about this, the editorial section being right-on unable to control what the paper's ad sales department, being less so, printed - although it all came from the record companies ultimately

but yeah there was cognitive dissonance between having a big feature on the Au Pairs and then some horrible heavy metal band's advert

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

well there is the infamous Roger Waters's Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking

http://www.pinkfloydhyldest.dk/waters/procon.html

which he defended, i recall, in a radio interview at the time "as being a long-running fantasy of mine" - as if that was an excuse!

Paul Hebron said...

Ohio Players album covers surely:

http://albumcovergallery.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/ohio-players-complete-album-gallery.html

full cover to Climax, either subversion or misogyny (in the arc of the album covers she's killer her captor, maybe):

http://img.sharedmp3.net/files/pics/1125/1124455/img_1_pr.jpg