The Death of the Album Cover

The music industry is considerably different from what it once was, and in many ways, I like the change. The old model, which is still relevant although going out of fashion, used to apply to everyone.

1. Write songs in a basement.
2. Find gigs, starting in inexpensive local venues and one day hoping to open for bands people had actually heard of.
3. Spend eight years’ income to get professionally recorded and press CDs (or cassette tapes or records).
4. Find enough gigs and sell enough albums, eventually, maybe, improbably, attract attention of someone capable of signing to a financed record label.
5. ?
6. Profit.

The negligible percentage of artists who completed that sequence succeeded in turning a hobby into a profession. (Paradoxically, many original fans lamented the transition from starving artist to successful musician and thus derisively dubbed the move “selling out.”)

Improvements in technology, along with the Internet, have changed everything. For one, it used to cost 75 dollars an hour to get recorded. Now, anyone can buy a 30-dollar microphone, download some cheap recording software, and record at his or her leisure. Similarly, there’s no need to press CDs. For better or worse, they are slowly becoming archaic, and a computer audio file is completely sufficient to market oneself and share one’s music. Moreover, not only are live gigs no longer a necessity, for certain genres of music, they’re an impossibility.

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Some effects are refreshing. For one, everyone listens to everything. Tastes still vary, and there are still plenty of condescending douchebags who demand that their musical tastes are superior to anyone who disagrees. However, if someone has, say, Phoenix on his iPod, he is just as likely to have Kanye West or Beethoven. I love that. I don’t even consider myself very old, but I can vividly remember being forced to pigeonhole my middle school identity to a strict genre of music. Moreover, I was only able to discover music if it was either local or signed to a major label. Now I can freely download, with ranging degrees of legality, anything from a ballad a shy teenage girl recorded in her basement to an album that a major label spent half a million dollars to create and market. Without analyzing the paradigm shift too much, if nothing else, it’s about time that any artist with a message can find an audience.

One change saddens me though. I miss the cover art. I thought about it while in Soundgarden, a used CD store not far from my apartment. I positioned myself in front of the rock aisle, squarely between the M and N columns. I first ran my index finger along a column of CDs, forcing all of the albums to lean away from me and exposing the frontmost cover: an urgent Morrissey caught mid-motion in front of a hapless sky, gracing his 1991 Kill Uncle solo album. I gripped the ridged crest of the plastic cover with my thumb and thwacked the next few albums towards me, exposing a new one, The Misfits’ 1997 American Psycho. Another thwack: My Chemical Romance. Madonna. No Doubt. The National. Alphabetization was haphazard at best, and each new album was accompanied by the familiar tsst of plastic cases colliding. The artists spanned decades of popular tastes, and every sound had a distinct image accompanying it.

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Some covers were ornate and resonated with as much energy as the music it embodied; others were bleak, minimalistic, and understated. Some were iconic, others obscure. Most noticeable for me, however, was the nostalgia. This is how I used to browse music; the art was seen first and heard later. Some covers—like Nirvana’s Bleach or Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire—still bring back feelings of angst and adolescence. Others—like The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico or The Clash’s London Calling—I know better than the music they contain.

There were even some albums that I bought for no reason other than their cover art. Thinking back, it really wasn’t that strange. The cost of a CD was about the cost of a small art print. When displaying my CDs, I always made sure my favorite covers were visible from some angle. Who says I couldn’t use them as decoration as well as entertainment?

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One of my favorite albums was Marilyn Manson’s Smells Like Children, his sophomore endeavor. Critics dismissed it, and with good reason; it was an utterly average rock record. A few weeks back though, while generally angry at the world, I downloaded this album and played it in my car for a few days. The most striking part was that, despite the album being a vivid teenage memory, none of the songs was familiar, aside from its lone breakout single, a cover of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams.” Instead, my memory of it is a horrifying green Manson silhouette, juxtaposed with a pink, childlike “Marilyn Manson” stamp, complete with a top hat planted above the first M. In fact, the entire album oozed rebellion and taboo, summarized with a “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” label, which was a hot-button issue at the time. Just the words “Marilyn Manson” during the mid-90s evoked images of Columbine, self-mutilation, and sexual ambiguity. Even the reverse side of the album was intriguing. The track titles alternated between disgusting (“May Cause Discoloration of the Urine or Feces”) and obscene (“Fuck Frankie”). Profanity in the titles had asterisks in place of most of the letters, adding to the album’s intrigue. To this day, I maintain an enormous amount of respect for Manson. As a musician, he is mediocre at best. But as an artist, he is superb.

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Sometimes the cover art became personal. I grew up on classical music, and it was not unusual to find, say, Haydn string quartets sandwiched between Nirvana and Marilyn Manson. Sometime around when hair started growing in weird places on my body, my parents took me to a Barnes & Noble in downtown Baltimore. I decided I was going to pick out a new classical album but couldn’t decide which one. While rock artists hire friends to make memorable avant-garde album covers, classical artists seem to think it’s fine to just get a picture of them smiling into a camera and looking mildly constipated. (It’s no surprise I had to conceal them with songs called “Fuck Frankie.”) However, one classical label, Seraphim Classics, adorned their album covers with portions of famous paintings. It’s still no urgent Morrissey, but it at least beats some guy holding an oboe and smiling as though he just consumed eight live humans.

Thumbing through Barnes & Noble’s rows of CDs, I found a recording of pianist Tzimon Barto playing Chopin preludes and nocturnes. To grace the cover, Seraphim Classics chose a painting called “Nocturne in the Parc Royal” by Impressionist painter William Degouve de Nuncques. The choice may have been superficial: Barto plays nocturnes, and the painting has nocturne in the title. The painting is a powerful one though. Just like a Chopin nocturne, at first glance, it is a tepid canvas of a single color. But when examined more closely, it sings stories of yearning and passion and despair. The scene looks familiar, lonely even, but it is also distinctly foreign. There are multiple moons and an arrangement of trees that could only exist in de Nuncques’ imagination. Even today, whenever I hear a Chopin prelude or nocturne, I can’t help but think of an expansive blue garden with a few trees in it. I have since given away or lost many of my CDs, but this one stays with me.

William Degouve de Nuncques "Nocturne in the Parc Royal"

Lest I sound like a grumbling old man who fears change, let me clarify that I have no problem with how many people create and consume music today. All things considered, as a kid who waited entire schooldays to finish downloading a 3 megabyte mp3 file, I welcome the convenience. But as someone who still has that antiauthority 16-year-old boy forever bottled up inside, I miss my creepy obscenity-laden Marilyn Manson album. Here’s hoping that someone who has barely bought a CD in his life reads this essay, ventures into a used CD store, and buys an album just because it looks cool.

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