Worst album covers: what about the rest?
Your travels hither and thither are a good source of inspiration, but sometimes that urge to create comes out all wonky because you've witnessed something so utterly and truly gash, something that truly epitomises the nature of being a complete gashbasket that you just can't sit by without letting someone else know that you're as mad as hell and you're not going to take it any more...and you're certainly going to quote as much pop culture on the way as possible because that's what everyone loves; complex series of emotions reduced to nifty quotes.
So, enter my thoughts on album covers; there are more than enough lists online and in magazines and invariably they steer towards crimes of the distant past, from an era where image and packaging was secondary to the music...sort of. Coming up with visual crimes is as easy as shooting dead fish in a barrel if you're looking more than 10-ish years into the past, but that's far too easy; every now and then it's nice to hunt out the cream of the (recent) crap and highlight their shitty shittiness in an easy to digest list; incidentally, this could go on for a while so you might want to skip to the end.
My journeys on the London Underground are
pretty much my only source of exposure to advertising that I simply don't just mentally block out; for one thing, the ads are too sodding big to completely bypass and sometimes I can't be bothered to read something to pass the time on short journeys, so for the last week or so I've had my eyes molested by Carl Barat's unbelievably gash cover for his solo album and I hate it; it's pretentious, it's boring, it exudes the air of an artist so healvily entrenched in his own world that he doesn't realise that the rest of the world is collectively reaching for the 'W' the 'T' and the 'F'.
Now to be fair to poor, downtrodden, Carl, none of this means that I think that what's hidden within is a total balls (I do actally); we're all told not to judge a book by it's cover and for the most part that would be true were in not for the way that content is marketed in such an aggressively targeted way these days. The same is true for books, TV, films, etc; advertising has become such an exact science that the ad men know which style of packaging to use in which market location to maximise sales. I'd love to pretend that I'm immune to this, but given my fascination with the visual spectacle, my shelves are full of a parade of items with similarly understated packaging aimed at those who probably pursued the arts in education or career or think of themselves as, like, a sensitive thinker, a real creator-type, y'know? In summary I'm a complete whore for pretty logos, clean lines and flat colours and I make myself sick, completely sick...though not as sick as I get when I look at Carl Barat's album cover or when I accidentally finding myself reading Pitchfork. But that's a whole other story for another day.
I'll make a list at some point. Everyone loves lists.
So, enter my thoughts on album covers; there are more than enough lists online and in magazines and invariably they steer towards crimes of the distant past, from an era where image and packaging was secondary to the music...sort of. Coming up with visual crimes is as easy as shooting dead fish in a barrel if you're looking more than 10-ish years into the past, but that's far too easy; every now and then it's nice to hunt out the cream of the (recent) crap and highlight their shitty shittiness in an easy to digest list; incidentally, this could go on for a while so you might want to skip to the end.
My journeys on the London Underground are
pretty much my only source of exposure to advertising that I simply don't just mentally block out; for one thing, the ads are too sodding big to completely bypass and sometimes I can't be bothered to read something to pass the time on short journeys, so for the last week or so I've had my eyes molested by Carl Barat's unbelievably gash cover for his solo album and I hate it; it's pretentious, it's boring, it exudes the air of an artist so healvily entrenched in his own world that he doesn't realise that the rest of the world is collectively reaching for the 'W' the 'T' and the 'F'. Now to be fair to poor, downtrodden, Carl, none of this means that I think that what's hidden within is a total balls (I do actally); we're all told not to judge a book by it's cover and for the most part that would be true were in not for the way that content is marketed in such an aggressively targeted way these days. The same is true for books, TV, films, etc; advertising has become such an exact science that the ad men know which style of packaging to use in which market location to maximise sales. I'd love to pretend that I'm immune to this, but given my fascination with the visual spectacle, my shelves are full of a parade of items with similarly understated packaging aimed at those who probably pursued the arts in education or career or think of themselves as, like, a sensitive thinker, a real creator-type, y'know? In summary I'm a complete whore for pretty logos, clean lines and flat colours and I make myself sick, completely sick...though not as sick as I get when I look at Carl Barat's album cover or when I accidentally finding myself reading Pitchfork. But that's a whole other story for another day.
I'll make a list at some point. Everyone loves lists.
Comments