Autumn rapper album cover12/23/2023 ![]() ![]() One scholar has even gone so far as to speak of “the death and resurrection of the album cover.” 19 But the album cover never really died, it just took on a new life. The appearance of cover images, lyrics, and liner notes in digital formats may appear as a radical break with previous formats. From this point of view, the materiality of vinyl and album covers resists the immateriality of the digital age. ![]() Much has been made of the recent explosion of interest in LPs. We can paraphrase the film theorist Jonathan Gray and say that “rather than simply serve as extensions of a text, many of these items are filters through which we must pass on our way to, our first and formative encounter with the text.” 10 Gray distinguishes between entryway paratexts, which would be an album cover that grabs the viewer before they reach the music and tries to control the listener’s entrance into the record and in medias res paratexts, which flow between the gaps of textual exhibition, or come to us during or after listening, as when one reads lyrics or liner notes as part of the listening experience, or when the music re-mediates the experience of the album iconography. Rather than regarding the paratext as external to the text, literary theorist Gerard Genette considers it a threshold, an “undefined zone…between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also transaction.” 9 Thinking of album covers as paratext makes us see and hear them as sites of convergence and interfacing. Surrounding and extending the recording, the album cover is paratext, a term that denotes things that present a text as a text, such as the artist’s name, a title, and illustrations. 8 Similarly, in the digital age, when labels release MC mix tapes or LPs that also contain a free download code for a digital recording, they are drawing on a retromania and cultural hierarchy of media formats while not imposing retro-listening practices. For instance, the rise of the LP format in the 1950s and the high-art association with classical music, and later jazz and rock, was as much about the promotion via the album cover designs as about the recording format itself. But it is also shaped by demands of, e.g., genre, economy, class, and cultural distinction. The physical shape of the album cover determines the size, dimensions, and material of the sleeve, to a certain extent. 7 Form and function are intertwined in the disc (or tape etc.), sleeve, and album design. This is where we interrogate the scopic regimes of the album cover 6 and examine shifting techniques of listening that goes with it. takes place and where work highlighting issues of representations of identity through cover designs is found. Historical studies of the album cover are where much of the analysis of the iconography, liner notes etc. 4 This can be approached through what Emily Dolan calls a “musicology of interfaces,” which suggests that the album cover can be thought of as an instrument through which we interface with sound. Rather than merely chronicling the history of the album cover, we can reconsider it as an example of what media theorists term device convergence (even before the time of digital media). Indeed, historicizing the album cover is only one of four ways to think about the sleeve and its design, the other three being paratext, audiovisuality, and materiality. 3 Despite these descriptions and histories, few scholars have attempted to theorize the album cover. Similarly, many studies of album covers describe a history of sleeve design and offer case studies with an emphasis on-or even bias toward-the LP and rock music. 2 These categories are, however, more descriptive than conceptual. Scholars have used generally four parameters to explain the album cover: a) as protection for the record inside b) advertisement for the music c) accompaniment or visual aid to the musical sound and text and d) commodity and collector’s item in its own right. ![]()
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