Favourite album covers

This isn't surprising coming from me of all people, but I really love all of The Beatles covers and how they so quickly evolved, challenged and influenced the medium over time.

Most album artworks from the mid-1960s and before looked just like their debut - Please Please Me. Normally just a nice photo or painting of the band from a photoshoot, usually listing the songs on the album - you see this with the American versions of their albums which they had no say in. They quickly start to evolve into artworks of their own. A Hard Day's Night, featured a sequence of photographs that gave off the feeling of animation of each individual Beatle - perfect for the soundtrack to their first feature film - a moving picture so to speak. Even Beatles for Sale, which might seem like your standard band photo shows The Beatles' weariness via their expressions as their fame and hectic touring schedules became overwhelming (by this point, they had been non-stop recording and touring for over 1.5 years now).

It was from Rubber Soul onwards they really started challenging the conventions of the album cover, with Rubber Soul not even featuring their names on the cover - I mean who even did this back then? They were so huge you didn't need their name on the cover (they actually wanted to do this as far back as With The Beatles but the label shot them down). The distorted image on the cover - while discovered by accident - is a great reflection of how drugs and psychedelics such as marijuana especially had started to come into play.

Drawing on influences from Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley's famous black ink drawings, Revolver expanded what an album artwork could be. By mixing reality with non-reality (aka photographs with cartoons), it was a fantastic representation of how psychedelics were influencing them and fusing with their music - I mean have you heard Tomorrow Never Knows? Such a trippy album cover! They were taking the album artwork from a simple marketing tool (see Please Please Me, and just about every other artwork around this time) to a work of art in it's own right.

Then you have Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart's Club Band which, while not my favourite album cover, is nothing short of genius. It explicitly engages the audience in so many ways, it draws the audience in with the immediate challenge of just identifying everyone behind their alter egos - what do all these people of different walks of life have in common? By juxtaposing highbrow artists like Marx or Aubrey Beardsley or Dylan Thomas, with pop icons like Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, the mop-top era Beatles, The Beatles signal the breakdown and mixing of high and low culture that they themselves exemplified. That's only scratching the surface, there is so much more to this album cover that meets the eye that is so brilliantly broken down in this visual essay, which I very happily admit to taking my notes from.

Then you look at The White Album, a complete and utter contrast to the colourful and vibrant nature of Sgt. Peppers and Magical Mystery Tour. I don't think you could have a much better artwork for this album, it perfectly represents the completely different styles each Beatle brings to the album - there is no 'one sound' on the album. Then you have Abbey Road, the most iconic album artwork in history. No name, no title. Just pure imagery. This was the end of The Beatles work together, the final album they ever recorded and it features them walking away from the very studio where they created almost all of their masterpieces.

At the bottom of this collage you have the artwork for their compilation series Anthology I, II and III. What really strikes me about these great collages - which in one photo gives you a good overview of The Beatles in the time period that specific album covers, but also putting them together side by side creates this marvelous collage of The Beatles throughout the 1960s.



I linked to this up above, but this fantastic 9 minute visual essay is an incredible and slickly edited look into how they changed the medium of album artworks over the course of a few years. It's also a really great history lesson in the creation of the album artwork itself - they used to have no album covers and just be placed on shelves like books!

I like this Tori Amos one:



Like the Janet one that Tony posted above, it alludes to something else without explicitly showing it (the infamous breastfeeding a pig shot). It is also an album cover that sounds like the music that's on the record; dark, creepy, haunting, angry (she is wielding a gun on the cover).

Another cover I like, which is a very polarising image (part of why I love it), is Prince's Lovesexy cover:



Makes me laugh to think that back in the late 80s, they sold this record in brown paper bags as this was considered too racy. I actually think it's beautifully shot and totally Prince. I love that not everybody "gets it" (much like the artist himself).

Same as above