Posts Tagged ‘album cover’
“I traveled far and wide through many different times”*…
Fifty years ago this month Harold D. Craft, Jr., published a remarkable black-on-white plot in his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University. A stacked series of jagged lines displayed incoming radio waves from pulsar CP1919, as detected at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Several months later the chart appeared as a full-page visualization in Scientific American, this time with white lines on a field of cyan [above]…
Scientific American
In 1977, the image was included in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy…
… where, two years after that, Factory Records graphic genius Peter Saville discovered it and adapted it as the cover art for Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. He reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black, against the band’s stated preference for the original. “I was afraid it might look a little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier in black.”
It has, of course, become an icon.
* Joy Division, “Wilderness,” from Unknown Pleasures
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As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1985 that the U.S. Senate held hearings on what they called “porn rock.” The session was convened at the urging of the Parents Music Resource Center, a group founded by Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius, and devoted to forcing the music industry to affix Parental Advisory stickers– “warning labels”– to albums and CDs deemed to contain morally challenged material (like the “Filthy Fifteen” songs the group condemned).
Three musicians– Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snyder– testified in opposition to the proposal at the hearing… which was in the end moot, as the industry, afraid of negative publicity, agreed voluntarily to begin the labeling.
It is unclear that the “Tipper sticker” was/is effective in preventing children from being exposed to explicit content. Some, citing the “forbidden-fruit effect,” suggest that the sticker in fact increases record sales, arguing as Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire has: “for the most part [the sticker] might even sell more records… all you’ve got to do is tell somebody this is a no-no and then that’s what they want to go see.”
“Here we are now, entertain us / I feel stupid and contagious”*…
Bardcore: “Smells Like Teen Spirit Cover In Classical Latin (75 BC to 3rd Century AD)”
[TotH to Jonah Goldberg]
* Kurt Cobain/Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
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As we scale the top of the pops, we might that it was on this date in 1969 that photographer Iain MacMillan shot the cover for what would be The Beatles’ last studio album, Abbey Road, just outside the studio of the same name, where the band recorded many of its classic songs. Macmillan, who worked quickly while a policeman held up traffic, used a Hasselblad camera with a 50mm wide-angle lens, aperture f22, at 1/500 of a second; he produced six shots, from which Paul picked the cover.
The photo, which simply shows the band crossing the street while walking away from the studio, has become iconic in its own right and provides “Paul Is Dead” enthusiasts with several erroneous “clues” to his “death,” including the fact that Paul is barefoot (supposedly representing a corpse, though McCartney has averred that it was simply a hot day).
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