Art covers don’t matter anymore, right? Music has gone all digital and nobody cares about buying the physical object, I know, there’s still vinyl, but the majority of people are downloading and streaming and will only look at the art cover as the tiny ¼-inch-wide image on their iPhone.
Still, Fuse TV proves us that art cover still matters by inviting PAPER magazine's senior editor Carlo McCormick to comment on five recent artworks done for Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, Fiona Apple, Chris Brown, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Can you judge an album by its cover? The result is interesting and a really clever analysis of the artists, and kind of the content too.
For McCormick, the black and white picture of Justin Bieber with that yellow ‘BELIEVE’ banner is actually a smart and weird concept at the same time, since it gives to the album a look of false god, or teen idol from the past, a fetish quality. He is right on, Bieber is a Paul Anka wannabe, just look at these pictures!
He thinks Maroon 5’s album cover art has borrows this pop-psychedelic-candy-coated visual code to the 60s but the drawing lacks meaning, and he has interesting things to say about Chris Brown’s self-invented font for his album:
‘It's a cypher. When you ask people what they think of Chris Brown, and that could be what you think of his life and his bio or his music, it's sort of like the cypher. It's so predetermined. Everyone has their own reading of him. Some people will never forgive him for what he's done, other people think his music's garbage and other people think he's the greatest thing that ever happened. So I think it works really good that way that he's admitting that he's a cypher. He's physicalizing it!’
As predicted, Fiona Apple’s art cover, a self-portrait she made herself, reveals a little too much about her, as he says this is the kind of art done by schizophrenics or people whose identities are falling apart!
And he is so funny when talking about the cover art for the new Smashing Pumpkins ‘Oceania’, which represents a sort of isolated tower in the middle of dead trees, ‘it’s a strong iconic image’,… ‘it’s monumental, phallic obviously, it’s kind of solitary’,…’an obsolete structure that actually has no use anymore, which is a little bit what they are as well’!
So, an album can actually be judged by its cover! And Fuse should do this sort of art analysis more often.