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Album Art: Dead for Good, Or Poised for a Digital Resurrection?
A while back I published an article that suggested that the digital revolution in music wasn’t necessarily all good. One of the reasons that I put forward was that the CD began the process of killing one of the things that made vinyl albums such a unique listening experience: album cover art. If you were to inquire of a select group of people what they consider to be the ultimate achievement in graphic artistry in the 1960s I’ll wager that a good many of them would respond that it was the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. Or if not that particular album cover, maybe something by Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or The Who. On the increasingly unfortunate chance that you may not be completely aware of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the best way to describe it is as collage of some of the most iconic faces of the century. Beyond that, the Sgt. Pepper album cover is also a fascinating piece of art due to the fact that it contains so many clues used in the “Paul-is-dead” rumor.
Could the Sgt. Pepper album cover have had the same impact placed within the small square of a CD jewel case? Highly illogical, captain. Can you even comprehend the possibility of a record label like Warner Brothers or Atlantic commissioning such an ambitious cover for use as CD packaging? The rise of the silver disc marked the beginning of the end of album artwork because they were so diminutive it just wasn’t profitable to expend the kind of energy on artwork that an unknown group could demand for an LP. I know of few better examples of how album art has been taken to the doghouse since CDs took over from vinyl than by examining the stage of album art as utilized by my own favorite band, New Order. While inarguably one of the most innovative and influential bands of the period that saw the death of the LP and the rise of the CD in regard to their actual music, New Order was also always at the forefront of putting out eye-rising art on the covers of not just their albums, but also their many 12 inch singles. New Order’s artwork was designed exclusively by Peter Saville, beginning when the band was still Joy Division. Just one look at the covers of the Joy Division album Closer and the 12 inch single Love Will Tear Us Apart reveals just how important a part the covers played in forging Joy Division’s image. The artwork on that album and that single couldn’t be a more appropriate visual punctuation to the music to be found inside. Throughout New Order’s career their albums and 12 inch singles literally jumped out of record bins, instantly drawing the attention of a casual browser. This is especially so in the cases of the fantastic covers of the 12 inch singles for “Murder,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Round and Round” and “Regret,” as well as the album covers for Power, Corruption and Lies and Low-life. The cover of Low-life wasn’t just intended to be a memorable album cover, it was also a deeply ironic and totally uproarious retort to the suggestions by the suits at Warner Brothers that New Order could be a much bigger band if the would only deign to put a face to their music. Check it out over there in the picture section and you’ll understand why I consider the Low-life cover to be such a hoot. All of Joy Division and New Order’s album art are suitable for framing as fine art. I know. I had mine framed on the wall at one point.
But back to the point. What does New Order’s most recent album cover look like? Well, it’s a white background with orange NO written on it. (At least as artistic as any Mark Rothko painting, I’ll admit, but hardly the brilliance of days of yore.) There just wasn’t really much point in expending a lot of energy into making album art for CDs. And now that most people get their music via download even the small-scale CD art will soon be a thing of the past. As the musical hardware of choice becomes the iPod and cell phones and all their brethren and delivery system of choice becomes the internet, not only will album artwork as it was known fade into just another cultural memory, but so too will the very idea of an album as we have known it. The day is fast approaching when bands no longer painstakingly decide which songs to put on an album and which to keep and in what particular order they want fans to listen to them, but will instead merely upload individual songs as soon as they are mixed and ready for release. To some this will be viewed as consumer empowerment: we will get to make our own albums. Another way of looking at it, however is that band no longer put out a collection of songs that have a unifying theme or message. Rap has already done away with the need for anyone in the band to know how to play a musical instrument; pretty soon they won’t need to write lyrics, they’ll just put a bunch of searchable keywords into a software program and have their songs spit back to them. This is the reason that so many people complain that pop music has no soul anymore. The future of pop music is bleak: Bands with no musical or lyrical ability who are nothing more than assembly-line singles producers, putting out their latest one song at a time with no artwork, no liner notes, and no individuality to speak of.
This is hope, of course. Listening to music isn’t done in the way it was a few decades ago. In fact, many people who listened to Sgt. Pepper this week may very well have been watching those hypnotic swirls on their Windows Media Player screen. Well, what if someone came up with an interactive Sgt. Pepper collage in which Edgar Allan Poe walked down to interact with Gandhi or Diana Dors? And why not include interactive album covers on your iPod. The time is ripe for a renaissance of album art, only this time it need not stop with static images.
The Best New Wave Soundtracks of All Time
Long before I actually saw Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette I was immediately intrigued the first time I saw the trailer because she used the song "Age of Consent" by my favorite band, New Order. I then found out that the film actually opens with my second favorite song of all time, "Natural's Not In It" by Gang of Four. A quick look at the soundtrack listing reveals Marie Antoinette is a pretty decent New Wave soundtrack. (Though, admittedly, Gang of Four is post-punk and not New Wave.) There are better New Wave soundtracks out there, however.
Anyone who channel surfed past the Family Channel during the holiday season of 2006 doubtlessly either flew past or stayed with one of the multiple airings of The Wedding Singer. The Wedding Singer is one of the all time great New Wave soundtracks, featuring my number one favorite song of all time, "Blue Monday" by New Order. In addition it contains the classic Smith's song "How Soon is Now" which also is fortunate enough to be well utilized within the movie, its gloomy industrial sound providing a perfect audio accompaniment to Adam Sandler's mood during the scene in which it appears. Although I would obviously prefer a multitude of other Elvis Costello songs, at least "Everyday I Write the Book" isn't his worst. On the other hand, "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs is one of that band's best. You'll also find songs by David Bowie, the Thompson Twins, and Culture Club on the Wedding Singer soundtrack. Just in case you buy the soundtrack to The Wedding Singer and you're wondering where the movie's opening foray into its New Wave milieu is-"You Spin Me Round"-you'll be happy to know it's on the Wedding Singer soundtrack volume II. This volume also contains the not-particularly-new wave but still entertaining "Love Stinks" by the J. Geils Band as well as songs from the B-52, Cars and Depeche Mode. It also contains one of the songs that proves A Flock of Seagulls was not the one hit wonder most people think. Yes, "I Ran" was a huge hit, but "Space Age Love Song" was streaming from car radios in the early 80s. For that matter, so was "Wishing" which isn't included on the soundtrack, but further undoes the one hit wonder lie.
When it comes to actually using New Wave songs in a movie, I'm not sure any movie does it better than Donnie Darko. I'm talking here about the original, not the director's cut, which manages to undo that very strength. The original opens with the haunting strains of Echo and the Bunnymen's "Killing Moon" which is absolutely perfect not only due to the lyrical content, but to the fact that the band singing the song has the word "bunny" in its name. If you don't know why that is just simply brilliant, then watch the movie. Equally affecting is the use of Tears for Fear's "Head Over Heels." I was never that big a fan of that song, but after watching how it was utilized in the incredible sequence in which over half the characters in the movie are introduced while it is playing I know find myself playing it over and over. And then, of course, there is elegiac cover version of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" that plays near the end of the movie, creating a sense of both sadness and giddiness. Although underutilized in the movie, the soundtrack also features Rolling Stone's Single of the Year for 1979, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division; the band that became New Order following the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. You'll also get a great Oingo Boingo song, "Stay" if you buy the Donnie Darko soundtrack.
Like The Wedding Singer, there are two volumes featuring music from or "inspired by" the cult classic Trainspotting. In addition to being one of the best films of the 90s, the Trainspotting soundtrack is one of the best for catching up on classic New Wave songs. Obviously, you're going to find Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" which enthusiastically and memorably opens the film. And then there's another New Order classic, "Temptation" as well as the Fun Boy Three's slower and more ominous version of the Go-Gos hit "Our Lips are Sealed." But you also get some newer artists that would have felt right at home during the early 80s, such as Blur, Sleeper and Elastica. Not as good as The Wedding Singer, but still worthwhile.
And then there's the king of New Wave soundtracks, the ultimate collection of New Wave songs and artists that really is a must for anyone interested in the great alternative tunes of the late 70s and early 80s. The soundtracks for Valley Girl really is more of a New Wave greatest hits package, a sampler album featuring both recognizable classics and less popular gems. If you've never seen Valley Girl-and you really should since it contains Nicolas Cage's best performance, still-you should know that it not only is packed with songs from beginning to end, but it's the best high school movie of the 80s. Far better than Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any of those Brat Pack abominations. Valley Girl so overflows with great music that it takes two volumes and even then some of the songs from the movie are still missing.
What's on the soundtracks? Volume one contains two incredibly infection Josie Cotton songs, "Johnny, Are You Queer" and "He Could be the One." It also features the late, great LA punk band the Plimsouls and their touchstone song "Million Miles Away." How about "Angst in My Pants" from Sparks? And let's not forget "Who Can it Be Now" from Men at Work, as well as the P. Furs' "Love My Way" again. And, finally, Modern English's great romantic work of art, "I Melt With You."
The follow-up More Music From the Valley Girl Soundtrack is even better, since it features a wider range of artists. Sparks is still there with their incredible "Eaten by the Monster of Love" and "Cool Places." Instead of Josie Cotton, you get the Josie Cotton sound-alike of "Girls Like Me." The Jam's masterpiece "Town Called Malice" and Bananarama's "He Was Really Saying Something." Also featured on volume two are songs by Culture Club, Thompson Twins and Rachel Sweet. And who can ever forget Total Coelo's "I Eat Cannibals."
It's hard to imagine any soundtrack featuring songs from the past decade ever being worth listening to whether you've seen the movie or not. New Wave was ridiculed by many at the time, but most of these songs sound fresher today than most new songs. New Wave songs have a frenetic energy and a sense of fun that is sorely missing from the repetitive, rap-heavy garbage that dominates radio today. Not only that, but notice how differently the songs sound; you can actually tell the difference between the music of the Plimsouls and New Order, between the Jam and Josie Cotton. Today's music is so homogenized and pre-packaged and market-tested that it all seems to have been produced by one man. And I'm not just limiting that description to the utterly redundant and repetitive rhythm and lyrical content of rap. To lend further credence to the argument that today's music says nothing to people about their life, consider that most of the songs used in Napoleon Dynamite are from the 80s and are New Wave. Can you imagine getting the same feeling from watching Napoleon Dynamite with contemporary songs?
There are other soundtracks that feature good New Wave songs and I highly recommend the soundtrack for Grosse Pointe Blank for its wonderful ska tracks. But if you really want to get a full taste of the best music from the New Wave era, these will probably do the trick.
Listen to Josie Cotton sing "He Could be the One" from the Valley Girl soundtrack album.
Kid Creole's Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
The concept album is probably a thing of the past, what with the rise of internet downloading of songs you like in the order you like rather than albums where the songs are in a particular order. It is generally agreed that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was the first rock concept album. Pink Floyd is the band most associated with the idea of the concept album. And The Who's Tommy is generally considered the zenith of the concept album concept. Most of those are pretty well known, but my favorite concept album is actually Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
Kid Creole was actually a multitalented musician named August Darnell. Kid Creole was a tough act to sell even in the anything goes radio scene of the early 80s. The band seamlessly combined elements of African and Caribbean music to create a rock-jazz-calypso blend that radio programmers had trouble defining. Was it rock? Jazz? New Wave? As a result, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places fell beneath the radar of audiences. What makes an album a concept album? Well, to put it in the simplest terms possible, a concept album goes beyond being merely a collection of songs; the songs are all interconnected to pursue either a story-such as Pink Floyd's The Wall-or a theme-such as Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. In the case of Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, the album offers up both a narrative, an obvious theme, and a very subtle subtext.
The story of Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places is presented as more of a musical soundtrack. In fact, at one point Kid Creole and the songwriters from Squeeze hoped to flesh the story out and mount it as a Broadway musical. More recently, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places has been mounted as the "first rap musical." The LP came with an inner sleeve that presented missives from the leading character detailing his odyssey around the world in search of his beloved Mimi. Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, you see, is a concept album that can be viewed as a modern updating of the story of The Odyssey. The album begins with the Kid catching a ride on a boat intent on finding his beloved Mimi. Along the way he and his troupe are arrested for singing on island in which singing has been banned, discover themselves in the middle of a revolution over what kind of music should be allowed to be played on the radio, sing a song of being lost in the middle of a jungle, wind up in a kind of Aryan civilization that has never seen a person with brown skin before, and even meet up with a certain species of cannibal.
As you may be able to tell from this simple description, Kid Creole has a lot more on his mind than a simple concept album story. In fact, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places tackles issues of racism both as it applies to the color of one's skin and the color of one's money. The fact that Kid Creole predicted his album would not get much airplay is touched upon throughout the album. Along the way the music ranges from the gorgeous ballad "I Stand Accused" to the infectious "Going Places" to my favorite, the African-influenced jungle rock of "In the Jungle." In many ways, of course, the concept of Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places is immediately apparent. But what I love most about it is the subtext. Keep in mind that the Kid sets off on his journey to track down his beloved Mimi. But if you separate those two syllables, you get Me-Me. My preference is to Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places as a concept album about the search for identity and meaning. In my view, Mimi doesn't exist as an actual flesh and blood entity, but is rather is an abstraction; a philosophical concept who stands as a symbol for a mystery far greater than whether Paul McCartney is really dead. Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places is an overlooked masterpiece.
Listen to "In the Jungle" from Kid Creole and the Coconuts' Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
