Post by #Infinity on May 1, 2019 3:35:55 GMT 10
This is something that I have been thinking about for a few years, but the more I look back upon the history of music, the more obvious it is to me.
From the hippie era onwards, album covers had been nearly as iconic as the music itself; the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road are probably the biggest examples, but for really a good 20 years or so, lots of effort was put into making an album sleeve a work of art in its own right, something that could captivate prospectuve customers in a record shop and sit proudly on their shelves. They usually conveyed stories and/or messages that perfectly complimented the music within. Even if the record itself was innocuous pop music, there was at least a consorted effort to make the artwork colourful and pleasant to look at.
From roughly the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, with some periphery influence in 1985/1986 and 1997/1998, there was a long period during which an overwhelming percentage of album covers were just plain, well, unappealing to look at. Suddenly, the new norm was for everything to have a generic backdrop, flat and lifeless text (usually in an ugly font), and bleak, repulsive, frequently monochrome colour schemes. Even if you were a flashy dance pop singer like Janet Jackson,Taylor Dayne, or New Kids on the Block, chances were that your album sleeve had a murky, blurry, monochrome aesthetic. Very rarely, too, did album covers become cultural touchstones of their own own. Sure, there were exceptions, such as Nirvana’s Nevermind, but in almost every case, the look of the sleeve was an afterthought. Things either looked safe and lazily slapped together, or they leaned into some sort of scoungy, unrefined style as an excuse, especially during the 1990s.
Why was this the case for so long? Why didn’t record companies put more effort into their album artwork so that they’d pop out and captivate your attention? Surely that must be intuitive; the overwhelming presence of this horrible style throughout the heavily commercial late 1980s and very beginning of the 1990s undermines the explanation that it was just the anti-polish zeitgeist of the grunge ‘90s.
My personal argument is that the shift was due to the evolution of music consumption during the 1980s. Firstly, MTV became the primary advertisement vehicle for music, causing the album sleeve to lose its primary role in catching people’s eyes. Putting lots of effort into a complex, layered sleeve wasn’t going to benefit you like it used to, so labels generally cut corners and instead put more focus on simplicity, so people could locate the record in the store, rather than analyze the sleeve alongside the music. By the time MTV became more known for reality television than music videos, album covers started to look much more appealing, diverse, and colorful again, albeit modernized.
Second, there is a major correlation between the popularity of the cassette and the bleak crappiness of album covers. This is significant because of the cassette’s heavily rectangular dimensions, which means something that looked good on vinyl may not translate well to a tape case. At the same time though, vinyl remained relevant for the rest of the ‘80s, while CD’s became mainstream in the late ‘80s and became dominant in the ‘90s. The cassette didn’t really lose prominence until around the turn of the century, when album artwork started to stand out again. During the long period of overlap however, it was important for an album cover to work effectively in both square and rectangular dimensions, meaning there wasn’t as much flexibility to be creative.
A third and perhaps less major reason artwork started to become much glossier and complex around 1999 is the rise of Adobe Photoshop. This tool drastically eased the process of adjusting images to have the perfect colour balances, the optimal font choice, and the appropriate layout to fit the CD cover. No longer did record companies have to play things so safe and monochrome to get a passing grade; now they had ample room to bring out the best in the album cover.
What are your thoughts about this?
From the hippie era onwards, album covers had been nearly as iconic as the music itself; the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road are probably the biggest examples, but for really a good 20 years or so, lots of effort was put into making an album sleeve a work of art in its own right, something that could captivate prospectuve customers in a record shop and sit proudly on their shelves. They usually conveyed stories and/or messages that perfectly complimented the music within. Even if the record itself was innocuous pop music, there was at least a consorted effort to make the artwork colourful and pleasant to look at.
From roughly the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, with some periphery influence in 1985/1986 and 1997/1998, there was a long period during which an overwhelming percentage of album covers were just plain, well, unappealing to look at. Suddenly, the new norm was for everything to have a generic backdrop, flat and lifeless text (usually in an ugly font), and bleak, repulsive, frequently monochrome colour schemes. Even if you were a flashy dance pop singer like Janet Jackson,Taylor Dayne, or New Kids on the Block, chances were that your album sleeve had a murky, blurry, monochrome aesthetic. Very rarely, too, did album covers become cultural touchstones of their own own. Sure, there were exceptions, such as Nirvana’s Nevermind, but in almost every case, the look of the sleeve was an afterthought. Things either looked safe and lazily slapped together, or they leaned into some sort of scoungy, unrefined style as an excuse, especially during the 1990s.
Why was this the case for so long? Why didn’t record companies put more effort into their album artwork so that they’d pop out and captivate your attention? Surely that must be intuitive; the overwhelming presence of this horrible style throughout the heavily commercial late 1980s and very beginning of the 1990s undermines the explanation that it was just the anti-polish zeitgeist of the grunge ‘90s.
My personal argument is that the shift was due to the evolution of music consumption during the 1980s. Firstly, MTV became the primary advertisement vehicle for music, causing the album sleeve to lose its primary role in catching people’s eyes. Putting lots of effort into a complex, layered sleeve wasn’t going to benefit you like it used to, so labels generally cut corners and instead put more focus on simplicity, so people could locate the record in the store, rather than analyze the sleeve alongside the music. By the time MTV became more known for reality television than music videos, album covers started to look much more appealing, diverse, and colorful again, albeit modernized.
Second, there is a major correlation between the popularity of the cassette and the bleak crappiness of album covers. This is significant because of the cassette’s heavily rectangular dimensions, which means something that looked good on vinyl may not translate well to a tape case. At the same time though, vinyl remained relevant for the rest of the ‘80s, while CD’s became mainstream in the late ‘80s and became dominant in the ‘90s. The cassette didn’t really lose prominence until around the turn of the century, when album artwork started to stand out again. During the long period of overlap however, it was important for an album cover to work effectively in both square and rectangular dimensions, meaning there wasn’t as much flexibility to be creative.
A third and perhaps less major reason artwork started to become much glossier and complex around 1999 is the rise of Adobe Photoshop. This tool drastically eased the process of adjusting images to have the perfect colour balances, the optimal font choice, and the appropriate layout to fit the CD cover. No longer did record companies have to play things so safe and monochrome to get a passing grade; now they had ample room to bring out the best in the album cover.
What are your thoughts about this?
