You may wonder why Springsteen’s face isn’t on the album cover. He’s wearing blue jeans with a white shirt, with a belt around his waist bejewelled with Texan designs and a baseball cap sticking out of his back pocket, shot against a backdrop of the American flag – it’s the most beautifully American image that one could think of, photographed by the great Annie Leibovitz. Springsteen is the quintessential voice for the American blue collar worker, and the cover art of Born in the USA reflects that excellently.
His music and his style perfectly capture the essence of Americana, and his lyrics encapsulate the struggle of the working classes. Born in the USAīruce Springsteen, also known as “the Boss,” is the ultimate American musician. 1984 is also important in that it was the last Van Halen album with the involvement of David Lee Roth for almost thirty years afterward. It’s like the band – or rather, their album cover designer, Margo Nahas – went out of their way to offend everyone who hates rock ‘n’ roll. It’s like George Carlin’s book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? – the comedian called it that, because he knew it would offend all three major religions. Van Halen combine all of those things beautifully in one single image: a baby, the most young and impressionable of all the Christians in the world, who also happens to be an angel, the symbol of Christianity and goodness and God and Heaven, who is puffing on a cigarette, the defining mark of the bad boy, and looking off into the distance with a look of James Dean coolness, listening to some Van Halen. And so goes the cover artwork of the Van Halen album 1984, which houses some of the most famous and iconic of the band’s songs, including “Jump,” “Panama,” and “Hot for Teacher.” Christians fear that rock ‘n’ roll is the music of the Devil and that anybody, no matter how devout or young or wayward they are, can be corrupted by it. 1984Īnyone looks cool smoking a cigarette – especially if they’re an angel. Here are the 10 coolest album covers of all time – and the albums themselves aren’t half bad either! 10. At least we have the ones that we have to look back on. Somewhere along the way, the art of crafting cool, interesting, thought-provoking, visually stunning album covers died a death.
Album covers used to be as ripe for artistic interpretations as anything you’ll find in the Louvre. You’d stare at the artwork while you were listening to the record, wondering why it was all black or what that metallic beast attacking Queen was or why John and Yoko decided to strip down for the cover of their album. You’d go out to a record store and actually pick up a physical copy of an album and examine the artwork on the cover. Back in the day, people would paint actual artwork for an album cover. Digital photography and Photoshop have made artists lazy. It’ll be a black and white digital photograph of Ed Sheeran holding a guitar or something lame and unoriginal like that.
Or if they do have them these days, then they’re just not inventive. If you’re buying your albums from iTunes or not even considering the album at all and going straight to the songs themselves in the VEVO channel on YouTube, then there’s really no need for album cover art. The art of album covers has kind of been lost in the past few years, because technology has made them obsolete.
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