Last Updated on 09/01/2022
Discover how the best album covers/artworks affect our experience of music – as a result of their unavoidable influence on the ‘aesthetic experience’ as well as the essential context they can provide.
Cover artwork is now a cultural colossus, but its arrival in the 30s signalled little of its legacy to come.
Widely introduced to fill space on the packaging of the ‘new’ 33 1/3 rpm LP, cover graphics have become as recognisable as the most popular songs on the records themselves – even more so in some cases. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures acts as a case in point.
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Seen adorning many a T-Shirt, its cover artwork is iconic in music culture. I’m doubtful that even all those of us who sport the clothing have listened to the album, never mind the rest of the west to whom the graphic is widely familiar. The visual has transcended the sonic.
Music in physical form, however, has seen a decline from its glory days. With it, the album itself has vacated the centre of attention to alternative music consumption formats. Yet album artwork persists. It beams out at you from your lock-screen. New release ads intersperse your friends’ selfies on your Insta feed. Maybe we don’t sit down and study the sleeve of our vinyl while it crackles away but album artwork still informs our experience of music and music culture.
To what extent do these visuals affect our appreciation of music as art though?
There is no doubt that cover images, as well as serving a commercial purpose, commonly represent pieces of art in themselves; often skilfully composed, many record covers feature designs credited to established graphic artists. But do the graphics contribute to the album experience itself, creating a unified sonic and visual work of art?
Right: The Velvet Underground & Nico, Self Titled, Verve (1967) – Album Artwork by Andy Warhol.
Answering this question requires some conception of what art is. Unfortunately there’s far from a widely accepted definition – the meaning of ‘art’ has long been a source of disagreement that has only become more muddled in the last century with the advent of ‘modern art’.
Currently, the two prevalent schools of thought could be considered the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘conventionalist’ interpretations of art. Both, I think, are useful when considering the relationship between album artwork and music.
‘Aesthetic’
In popular culture today, the sentence ‘this is so a e s t h e t i c’ is thrown around with some frequency. It has become a phrase associated heavily with lovers of Flower Boy and Currents (lol, me) and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the urban outfitters catalogue. These modern connotations of ‘aesthetic’ are not in complete harmony with the the word’s use in art theory. In that context, ‘aesthetic’ refers to manifestations of beauty in art; really, softboy/softgirl ‘vibes’ only encapsulates a type of aesthetic common to certain fashions, music and album artworks (etc.).
Right: Tyler, The Creator, Flower Boy, Colombia (2017)
Many contemporary aesthetic theories of art centre on ‘the aesthetic experience’. This is the idea that our experience of something’s beauty, which is conveyed via its features, is what makes it art. ‘Intensity’, ‘coherence’ and ‘completeness’ have been suggested as factors that contribute to artistic value. Intuitively this idea makes sense. I am sure most music lovers can think of an album where all the separate parts seem to acquiesce perfectly, stimulating such forceful sensation that you can palpably feel its beauty. The same also seems true of the best paintings.
Cover graphics’ relationship with music is illuminated by this understanding a little.
Generally, your ‘experience’ of something is a consequence of all you sense about it. For example, your experience of an ice cream might be made up of how it smells, looks, feels and tastes. ‘Aesthetic experience’ is composed of your sensations of beauty. Listening to a sad song in the rain might constitute a sort of beautiful ‘experience’, as the coolness of the rain and darkness of the sky might cohere with and complement the beauty of the music.
When considering a piece of art though, not every facet of experience contributes to the ‘aesthetic experience’ of that work. The rain cannot be part of an artwork. This is because it may only rain one particular time that you listen to a song but not during any subsequent listens – it was merely incidental.
Cover art, however, makes up part of your experience pretty much every time you give any particular album a spin; it’s been provided by the artist so that you see it each time you click play on Spotify or stick your vinyl LP on. If the provided visual shares values of coherence, completeness and intensity with the music (as the rain did with the song we talked about before), it would then become a necessary part of the unified aesthetic experience, and it’s difficult to not see it as part of the same piece of art.
And much album artwork complements the music in exactly this way, contributing to one work of beauty; the case of loveless by my bloody valentine is a perfect example.
This dizzying shoegaze album is one full of noisy guitarwork, undercut with sugary melodies. It is intentionally opaque and scattered with cryptic murmurings – and that’s when you can even discern the lyrics through the overawing guitar fuzz. The point, as (you could argue) with all the best art, is how it makes you feel though. Kevin Shield’s meticulous sound construction resulted in the creation of the most stunningly textured and emotive 48 minutes of noise.
The graphic on its cover could not match this anymore perfectly. There is guitar. There is obscuring mist. There is intense and exquisite colour. It’s difficult to describe in words quite the extent of the connection, but upon listening you will find that the cover embodies a comparable feeling to the record, working in perfect harmony with it. A unity of aesthetic experience evidently appears to exists.
It’s often the primary intention of an album cover to achieve this effect, with listless other records whose cover artwork executes a similar result. So, as alluded to before, the aesthetic contribution from album cover art often seems inevitable when considering the aesthetic experience provided by music albums, as the cohering and completing experience of the visual artwork is largely unavoidable.
Convention and Context
Conventionalist interpretations of art can also provide insight into the role of album artwork.. Their understanding of art is vastly different. It neglects focus on the experience of art’s properties in lieu of appreciation of what message is conveyed by an artwork, through the lens of context and convention.
Artworks whose artistic value seems to lie only in its commentary and messaging is why this interpretation arose. Tracy Emin’s ‘My Bed’ is a piece of modern art that falls into this category. Appearing to be merely an unmade (and pretty grim) bed, to Emin it was an expression of her unhealthy mental state brought on by a difficult sexual relationship. It is not beautiful or ‘aesthetic’ but an artefact that many believe to hold artistic value (although many obviously do not also). It sold for £2,546,500 in 2014.
More relevantly this interpretation could also be applied to analyse albums of popular music. The artfulness of the music of My Bloody Valentine’s loveless could be explained by considering how context leads us to interpret both its instrumentation and lyricism and arrive at that which the artist aimed to convey. For example, our knowledge of the traditional guitar led rock band, covertly contextualises our experience of the ‘slurred rock’ sound of this album. The slowing down and spreading out of usually sharp guitar sounds with effects pedals, into floating, pillowy instrumentals suggests a sense of detachment or escapism from normal life through the clouding of musical convention. But we would not view it the same way if the popular music landscape consisted purely of blurrier and noisier music, and loveless was an experimental cleaning up of that sound.
Furthermore, in the same way that the idea of a unified aesthetic experience of the visual and sonic was motivated above, a position could perhaps be held arguing that a thematic union of messaging creates one piece of art. This is particularly compelling when the artwork contributes key context that the artist wishes to provide to help interpret the music.
The Root’s Things Fall Apart uses its cover to this effect. It would be easy to listen to this record and appreciate only the craft of the live band and the technical rapping of Black Thought and the late Malik B. But the provocative cover serves as an effective accentuator of the chaos and fear already present in both the lyrical themes and sound of the album – channelling effectively the worries of marginalised groups who felt left behind in late 90s American society.
This is perhaps comparable to the way in which tracks contained within the same album may accentuate the thematic value of the others – like on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, where the final track “Mortal Man” provides important information heightening the power of the project’s other tracks.
Yet, holding important context doesn’t qualify something as part of the art it provides context to. Album liner notes or ‘Genius’ annotations are pieces of context, sometimes officially supplied by the artists themselves, but it would not seem right to suggest they are part of the art (very interesting though they are).
Album artwork does seem obviously different to these, however. Firstly, it is often considered a piece of artwork in itself, which it would be hard to to argue genius annotations are. It’s also presented to the consumer each time they listen to an album, while you must seek out genius annotations of your own volition; these annotations don’t seem to be ‘essential context’, as the artwork might be viewed.
Perhaps certain thematic unions of messaging between two essentially related pieces of art could constitute a single, unified work of art within the boundaries of art’s conventional interpretation.
It may be though, that despite all this, the impact cover art has on our appreciation of music as art is minimal. Cover graphics often have ulterior intentions that are not wholly artistic. Advertising to encourage commercial sales is a prime example of another motive that could lead to the watering down of artistic value with attention grabbing tactics. For example, Liam Payne’s LP1 utilises the advertising strategy of displaying a striking picture of the artist’s (quite nice) face to connect fans with the character the music is associated with – since, given his profile, he is the reason that most people will ultimately listen to his music. That is not to say that there cannot be artistic value in a portrait photograph, just that ‘sales’ is often the primary motivation for using them in pop music.
Even if added artistic value is the primary intention (which I believe it is in many cases), we can’t really know how much difference album art makes anyway when the music is the main attraction – ‘percentage artfulness boost’ by a cover graphic isn’t really a measurable quantity. Though my personal experience makes me feel that it is pretty unlikely that this effect is negligible, when the visual artwork’s thematic and aesthetic value often feels so undeniable and essential.
Nevertheless, the influence of album artwork is by no means a closed case: Does bad cover art detract from an album? Would we like our favourite albums quite as much without the cover art? Can critics really claim to be unaffected by its sway when judging an album?
It really is a powerful cultural and artistic device. But exactly how influential is it on music as artwork?
If you are interested in learning more about some of the art theory alluded to in this article I would recommend the following:
- ‘But Is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory’ by Cynthia Freeland as a starting point.
- The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy online entries on ‘The Definiton of Art‘ and ‘The Concept of the Aesthetic’ , if you can fancy a slightly more technical read.
