Well, this is a bummer.
With the impending demise of Is Greater Than, it seems that this will be my last column for this here web site, and the last installment ever of Records by Their Covers (assuming HuffPo doesn’t come calling). Keep your eye out for the coffee table book, though. It’s been fun dissecting album covers and displaying my musical ignorance for the world on a monthly basis, and being a part of the Is Greater Than family. I tip my hat to Paul Davis for his efforts, and I wish him all the best in future endeavors.
I didn’t really have a choice for the theme for this final piece. All I had to do was search [internet retailer]‘s music releases for “End,” sort by date, and voila! A delightful pile of crap, with a few sparkling diamonds embedded in it.
There’s an old album cover with an image of a microphone wearing a tuxedo and bowler hat; there’s another with a blue-on-blue background and a lone piano under a yellow streetlight; another has a horseman riding across the neck of a violin. These covers, along with roughly 2,500 others, were designed by the same man; Alex Steinweiss.
From the late-1930s through the early ‘70s, Steinweiss designed album covers for record labels including Columbia, Decca, Remington, RCA, London and more. His portfolio is packed with vibrant, playful illustrations that were designed to catch the eye of potential record buyers. His job was to package classical, jazz, pop, country, soundtrack, vocal, orchestral and blues records in such a way that people would want to buy them. In doing so, he solidified album art’s place in pop art, established a much closer relationship between music and its packaging and became one of the most celebrated and recognizable designers of the 20th century. Steinweiss, who passed away on July 17, 2011 was a key player in transforming record packaging into an art of its own.
The thing about the way I troll for fodder for this column – going to [monolithic internet retailer]‘s web site, clicking on new music releases for a given week, seeing what catches my eye – is that I have no way of knowing whether the album covers that I write about are in fact new, or are just reissues of older albums. This is exacerbated by the fact that I’m looking for artists I’ve never heard of and don’t permit myself to do any research on them before I write about their album covers. So the odds that I will end up exposing my ignorance by writing about an established, classic artist that I’ve just never heard of are fairly high.
This month I crank those odds up a bit more by picking album covers with designs that are either inspired by classic designs of the past or, maybe actually are classic designs of the past. Once I finish writing this I’ll go and figure out what’s what, but for now we’ll just feast our eyes on some timeless (or perhaps just anachronistic) album covers.
One of the most compelling cover images ever?
There are a lot of headbands in the National Basketball Association. And socks and towels and jerseys. And on every one of them; in fact on just about all things NBA, there is the logo. You know the one. It’s one of the most recognized images in the world. And anyone who has the slightest interest in basketball knows that the guy in the image is Jerry West. Everyone, that is, except the NBA, which tends to hedge questions about the logo saying that they don’t have a record of who it is.
It may be well into the glorious, green, sunny season of spring – at least for those of you not stuck in the interminably cloudy, cold weather sinkhole that is Seattle these days – but that doesn’t mean everyone’s releasing bright, cheery indie-pop records about bunnies and dancing and dancing bunnies and dancing with bunnies. There are still many musicians out there crafting dark, disturbing works and putting them out whenever they damn well feel like it. If you do pick up any of these albums, you’ll probably want to wait until nightfall to put them on the old hi-fi.
My introduction to Marc Chagall’s dreamlike figures, at least outside of an art history book, was in 1998, during a trip to France. But the first time I saw Marc Chagall’s America Windows was in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (it is, of course, the backdrop for Ferris and Sloane’s kiss at the Art Institute of Chicago). Beloved in both French museums and opera houses and to American moviegoers, Chagall is probably best known for reinventing the stained glass window.
When I moved to Chicago in 2005, America Windows was in the process of being deinstalled for the Art Institute’s expansion, so I didn’t get to see it in person until it was unveiled again last fall. I’ve since seen it many times in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, where it’s exhibited near smaller versions of public art in Chicago, including Calder’s Flamingo and an unnamed Picasso sculpture. (Incidentally, the irony is palpable: an exhibit on public art in a space available to those who can pay nearly $20 for admission.)
Levi Fuller on axe-wielding album cover stars
Lynette D’Amico considers the power of empty space in urban design
What name do you associate with the “We Can Do It” poster? Rosie the Riveter? Yeah, me too; until recently, anyway. Turns out, we’re wrong. Kind of. The iconic image captures an era and serves to remind us of a great—though somewhat unintentional—wave of American feminism that will always be associated with Rosie the Riveter, but, it’s not Rosie.
Laura M. Browning on whether mass-produced art can still be considered art
On the in-house design “services” offered by a prominent CD manufacturer
“There is something simultaneously appealing and repellant about having a place for all our stuff.”
Laura M. Browning considers her resistance to the art of Jeff Koons
Levi Fuller finds a few rare examples of design worthy of praise
ART CAN’T HURT YOU BY LAURA M. BROWNING: “This was my first visit to the murals, but it was clear they had changed. I was walking along an abandoned viaduct in Pilsen, one of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. It was gray and cold, like so many glum Chicago afternoons, and the murals struck the same tenor as the late fall weather.”
A FINE LINE BY CAT JOHNSON: A look at Nudie Cohn’s legendary glittering Western suits
BY JEANETTE WYCHE: A spring 2011 collection of hand-dyed work
BY LEVI FULLER: Questionable design choices to hook them while they’re young
ART CAN’T HURT YOU BY LAURA M. BROWNING: What strange hold over us do murals possess?
Paul M Davis