In yesterday’s Independent, Peter Saville, the legendary album cover designer, declared the album cover “dead”.
Speaking from his studio this weekend, Mr Saville believes that cover art is dead, not just because of technology, but because the youth culture in which albums once operated has changed: “We have a social disaster on our hands,” he said. “The things that pop music was there to do for us have all been done… there’s nothing to rail against now.
“When I was 15, in the North-west of England…. the record cover to me was like a picture window to another world. Seeing an Andy Warhol illustration on a Velvet Underground album was a revelation…. It was the art of your generation… true pop art.”
While I agree, to an extent, the individual image on the cover of an album holds less importance than it once did, to say that album artwork is “dead” is to miss the point of this new multidimensional, multimedia, multisensory world we live in.
With the death of the LP, album artwork took a blow, being reduced from large and eyecatching works of art, to small, CD-jewel-case filling bits of paper. The album packaging went from being a treasured piece of art, to being a small and manufactured artifact. Now, with iTunes and the iPod, the album cover itself has been reduced to a 5cm square lit up on a screen. It is disposable, intangible, and ultimately, less important to the musical experience.
But the problem with album artwork goes deeper than that. Saville argues that today’s youth have nothing left to rebel against - sex, drugs, rock and roll - they’ve all been done. He calls this a “social disaster”. This could be Saville’s age showing, having little or no relation to today’s youth. But it could also hold some truth - rock and roll was the revolution of the baby boomer generation. Elvis, The Beatles and The Sex Pistols were the first acts to use rock and roll to communicate their message of revolution to the new teenage generation. War was over, young men and women were no longer drafted into service, and they now had money and the freedom to express themselves. Music was the vehicle of choice for our parents to find and define themselves.
What Saville fails to realise is that while music remains a revolutionary vehicle for today’s pop culture junkies, the 10 track LP is but a grain of sand on a beach of possibility. Since the 1980’s, the way we interact with and consume pop culture has been changing and evolving at an amazing pace. Teenagers today have the same thoughts, worries, insecurities, interests and pleasures that the teenagers of the 1960’s, ’70’s and ’80’s had, but their options for expressing and sharing these thoughts are much wider, faster and more diverse. Pop culture for today’s youth is about the convergence of music, video and technology, and the ability to express yourself through interactive mediums like the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
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