Article about album cover art (kinda good)
Davis
9 Posts
http://www.ajc.com/hp/content/auto/epaper/editions/sunday/arts_242e196a966651af0038.htmlWho cares about covers?Music's portability endangers the tradition that produced these classic imagesNick Marino - StaffSunday, July 24, 2005A few years ago, an unusual customer walked into Wax 'N' Facts, a cluttered Little Five Points space that sells CDs and vinyl albums. The store generally appeals to the sort of fetishistic music geeks who alphabetize their record collections. This particular customer, however, selected a CD, paid for it, then promptly trashed every bit of packaging and left with only the silver disc. Sean Bourne, the store manager, was slackjawed. Bourne grew up buying records, at least in part, because of the packaging. To him, album covers told stories. He'd place a record on his turntable, drop the needle, sit down and pore through the pictures and liner notes. Packaging had long been an intrinsic part of his listening experience. And now here was someone who considered it worthless. These days, Bourne's not so shocked by the concept. He watched packaging suffer its first major blow more than a decade ago, when the 5-by-5-inch compact disc replaced the 12-by-12-inch vinyl record, shrinking the packaging artist's canvas. Then, as CD players became standard in cars, he lived through an era that saw listeners begin abandoning their booklets and jewel boxes for cases that held dozens of discs in plastic sleeves. Now consumers can simply purchase song files directly from a digital music store and load the tunes onto players such as the market-dominating iPod, cutting album packaging completely out of the equation. This has some packaging artists and music fans like Bourne concerned. Is their beloved album art on its way to becoming a niche product? "It may already be," Bourne says. "I think it's a done deal." An uncertain future Before anyone panics, clutching their mint-condition cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" to their chest, Billboard magazine senior analyst Geoff Mayfield reminds us that "digital albums only accounted for 0.8 percent of album sales in 2004. As big a deal as it is, and as exciting as it is, buying albums on the Internet accounted for less than 1 percent of album sales. So the album's still carrying the mail for music sales." And Mayfield thinks albums will always have some form of art. Maybe a CD purchased at a store will continue to have a booklet and jewel case. But an album bought online might entitle fans to a free poster in the mail, or possibly a screensaver to download. He believes that, in a flooded marketplace, visual marketing may become more important than ever as a way to distinguish one artist from the next. Tell that to Susan Archie. The Atlanta-based art director was nominated for the 2004 Grammy for the gospel box set "Goodbye, Babylon," which housed its six CDs in a cedar box stuffed with raw cotton (symbolizing struggle), and she won the 2002 Grammy for best boxed or special limited-edition package for the blues set "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton." Since the Patton box, Archie says, she has averaged six or seven projects a year, which she says is not enough: "I can't exist. So right now, I am faced with having to get a day job." Business is steadier for Sue Meyer, a North Carolina freelance artist with a long and successful gig designing packaging for rootsy record label Sugar Hill. One of her recent projects, the debut CD by the Canadian quintet the Duhks, may be the most distinctively packaged disc of the year to date. Still, Meyer's worried that consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable downloading music and skipping the packaging. If this continues, people like her and Archie could be rendered obsolete. "I'm 51," Meyer says. "So 15 more years --- that's all I ask." If album packaging went away --- in 15 years or 15 minutes --- what exactly would we lose? For starters, we'd lose the covers, home to such iconic images as Andy Warhol's banana ("The Velvet Underground & Nico"), Nirvana's swimming baby ("Nevermind") and the Hipgnosis-designed Pink Floyd prism ("Dark Side of the Moon"). Then there's the spine, the lyric sheets, the illustrations and photographs, the thank-yous to A&R men and producers and the Higher Power Without Whom Nothing Is Possible. Sometimes, packaging contains delightful surprises, hidden messages and posters --- rewards that help draw serious music junkies deeper into the album's artistic concept. To a casual music fan, this all may seem incredibly trivial. But not to Hollis King, vice president of creative services for Verve Music Group. "What do art people do?" he asks. "What do graphics people do? Well, we basically put skin and bones and smell to music." At Verve, King runs an art department with a four-person staff and perhaps a dozen freelancers. In a given year, the 10-year veteran oversees the art on about 120 CDs, plus label advertising and T-shirts. Although, like Billboard's Mayfield, he anticipates the visual world adapting to incorporate multimedia elements, King understands independent artists' anxieties about making a living in the downloading age. "Some people say to me, 'I got so little money offered for a job that I didn't call back. I was so embarrassed,' " he says. "Because budgets have been cut so dramatically." In fairness, King says that art departments experienced cuts before the downloading revolution. Still, we're a long way from the packaging glory days of the vinyl era, a time that saw artists Storm Thorgerson and Reid Miles become something like visual rock stars. Both Thorgerson and Miles developed devoted followings for their work, and their album art --- for the Hipgnosis design team and Blue Note Records, respectively --- is so enduring that it has been anthologized in books. "Basically we're in a mode now," King says, "where everybody is trying to survive." Upholding tradition Fortunately for packaging fans, album artists still have some champions who believe in the power of the tactile experience. Bob Hurwitz is one such person. Hurwitz runs Nonesuch Records, a boutique label (and a part of Warner Bros. Records) that is committed to high-quality packaging for its artists, who include Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour, classical soprano Dawn Upshaw and fringy rock band Wilco. Nonesuch albums generally come packaged in an O-card, a slipcase that allows for extra art and makes CDs more interactive than standard jewel cases. The packaging commonly has fancy liner notes and drawings. It feels heavy in your hands, the difference between a magazine and a novel. Nonesuch's emphasis on packaging partly traces back to Hurwitz's childhood experience collecting baseball cards. "The only thing that baseball cards told me, when I collected them as, like, an 8-year-old, was about visual memory," Hurwitz says. "Your visual memory retains things for a long time, whether it's the 1961 Willie Mays card or the 1965 'Blonde on Blonde' cover or the 2004 Wilco cover." That Wilco album, "A Ghost Is Born," won the 2004 Grammy for best recording package. The album cover is a study in minimalism, a whole egg in the center of a soft gray frame, speaking of blank space and fragility. In the image beneath the O-card, the egg is cracked in half, with jagged shell corners resembling shards of glass. The package comes with a 26-page booklet containing lyrics and psychedelic late-'60s illustrations by Gladys Nilsson. By devoting so much attention to packaging, Nonesuch tries to make products with a timeless shelf life, something like that Willie Mays card. A digital music file, by contr
ast, is but a keystroke away from oblivion. Over at New West Records, Drive-By Truckers singer-guitarist Patterson Hood also remains a devout packaging enthusiast. Truckers packaging artist Wes Freed is practically a band member, Hood says, and Truckers records are so visually intensive that they work like "a musical graphic novel." That said, even Hood can understand the power of portable, packageless music. "I got an iPod for my birthday," he says, "and I think the things are great." The last piece of new technology that he loved this much, he added, was the turntable. ANATOMY OF A GREAT ALBUM DESIGNSlip off the O-card and crack open the jewel case and you'll find a 14-page booklet with six group shots of the band, plus headshots of each member. (A seventh band shot is hidden under the disc.)The booklet also includes lyrics for most songs, plus italicized track-by-track dedications and explanations. The band's label, Sugar Hill, was interested in the fancier production, Meyer says, because the Duhks were a new band and deserved a fresh presentation. Duhks banjoist Leonard Podolak says the finished CD looks 'fantastic" and that it gives a sense that the band is eclectic, outgoing and "kind of freaky.'
ast, is but a keystroke away from oblivion. Over at New West Records, Drive-By Truckers singer-guitarist Patterson Hood also remains a devout packaging enthusiast. Truckers packaging artist Wes Freed is practically a band member, Hood says, and Truckers records are so visually intensive that they work like "a musical graphic novel." That said, even Hood can understand the power of portable, packageless music. "I got an iPod for my birthday," he says, "and I think the things are great." The last piece of new technology that he loved this much, he added, was the turntable. ANATOMY OF A GREAT ALBUM DESIGNSlip off the O-card and crack open the jewel case and you'll find a 14-page booklet with six group shots of the band, plus headshots of each member. (A seventh band shot is hidden under the disc.)The booklet also includes lyrics for most songs, plus italicized track-by-track dedications and explanations. The band's label, Sugar Hill, was interested in the fancier production, Meyer says, because the Duhks were a new band and deserved a fresh presentation. Duhks banjoist Leonard Podolak says the finished CD looks 'fantastic" and that it gives a sense that the band is eclectic, outgoing and "kind of freaky.'
Comments
I don't know where I'd be with out the thank-yous to the A&R men.
Seriously, it would be cool if, inlcuded in digital downloads, were L.P.-sized image files of album art and liner notes.
I think u just go to the artists' website, where u can watch them scramble eggs on the tour bus.
they don't want none of that, just the 2-3 songs on the album that the people actually like. One of them likely in heavy rotation of MTV.
I used to trip as my college bound sister used to drive home from school listening to the same 10 popular songs on popular radio station, she would then get ready to go clubbing listening to the cds of the same 10 popular songs, then dance at the club to the same 10 popular songs. After about a month, the 10 songs change, the cd's are forgotten and discarded. Oh well, so is the life of pop music I guess.