A great piece of album art can tie an album together, give listeners something to discuss
while they groove to the tunes, and provide clues about the inspirations behind the music.
Or it can just be an obtuse series of weird, random images.
So where do your favorite album covers fall on the spectrum?
Here's a look at the hidden meaning behind these classic album covers.
The cover of the classic 2003 White Stripes
album Elephant appears to just feature band members Jack and Meg White sitting on a trunk.
But in Jason Draper's A Brief History of Album Covers, Jack White claims that no matter what
angle you look at it, the cover actually shows the two of them forming the image of an elephant's
head.
"If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant.
But it's a side view an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side."
Just… keep looking.
You're bound to see it eventually.
The cover for Rihanna's 2016 album Anti features
an artfully out-of-focus image of a child, wearing a crown and holding a black balloon,
against a white and blood-red background, along with some Braille messages.
It's the work of artist Roy Nachum, who explained to Rolling Stone that he started with a real
childhood snapshot of the singer, taken on her first day of daycare at age 5.
"The crown over the eyes is a symbol for the music.
Here, I painted the young Rihanna bringing something new."
And the Braille message is from a poem called "If They Let Us" by Chloe Mitchell, which
reads in part "I sometimes fear that I am misunderstood.
/ It is simply because what I want to say, / what I need to say, won't be heard."
Message received.
Say what you will about Coldplay, but the
cover for their 2005 album X&Y is refreshingly weird, with a blue background, and some random,
rainbow-colored blocks that looks like somebody made an appetizer out of Lego bricks.
It turns out those colorful shapes are actually a graphical visualization of the Baudot code,
which was an early telegraph communication system patented by French inventor Emile Baudot
in 1870.
On X&Y, the different colors and sizes of the blocks correspond to different bits and
their letters, which spells out … the album's title.
Sometimes, you can sell something just by
saying it plain.
Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney's brother Michael designed the cover of the 2010 album
Brothers.
According to the New York Times, Michael suggested the text reading, "This is an album by the
Black Keys.
The name of this album is Brothers" against a black background.
He thought the raw, simple cover reflected a similar sensibility in the band's bluesy,
rootsy rock.
There's more to it, though, as the cover also references the cover of blues legend Howlin'
Wolf's 1969 LP The Howlin' Wolf Album.
A goth-rock classic, Joy Division's 1979 debut
album Unknown Pleasures wasn't an immediate success.
But the record's mysterious cover was, thanks to its series of close-set squiggly lines
that form mountain-like peaks in the middle.
So what do those squiggles mean?
Well, album designer Peter Saville explained that they are a visual representation of the
radio telescope readings of the first pulsar ever discovered by astronomers, and the image
is originally from the 1977 edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia.
Far out.
One of the most famous album covers of all
time belongs to Fleetwood Mac's 1977 effort Rumours, which features only two of the band's
five members, perhaps in reference to the legendary in-fighting that eventually tore
the supergroup apart What's not in doubt is the symbolism of the
pair of dangling balls that hang in front of Mick Fleetwood's crotch.
While everyone immediately gets it, what most fans don't know is that Fleetwood's unique
style came from an unlikely source, as he drunkenly stole the balls from the flushing
chain of an old timey toilet at a pub while on a bender.
The balls he sports now aren't the originals, though, as he eventually had to have a carpenter
create a replacement pair after the originals got lost during a tour.
Artist Aubrey Powell co-founded a design studio
called Hipgnosis, which frequently worked with Pink Floyd on album covers, including
their 1975 album Wish You Were Here.
According to Powell's book Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art, Hipgnosis's other chief creative, Storm
Thorgerson, wanted to visually depict Pink Floyd's cynicism about business and capitalism
by illustrating the then-common expression, "I've been burnt," which meant someone had
been ripped off.
In order to create the iconic cover, they hired stunt man and lit him on fire, though
it wasn't until the 15th shot that the photographer finally got the image they used for the cover.
Poor stunt man!
Legendary producer Rick Rubin revealed in
the book 100 Best Album Covers that while making the classic 1986 Beastie Boys album
Licensed to Ill, he happened to read the salacious Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods.
"In the book, there is a photograph of the Led Zeppelin private jet and the idea of this
cover came from that.
The Beastie Boys were just a bunch of little guys and I wanted us to have a Beastie Boys'
jet.
I wanted to embrace and somehow distinguish, in a sarcastic way, the larger-than-life rock
'n' roll lifestyle."
But because the Beastie Boys are the Beastie Boys, there's also another, more puerile joke
hidden on the Licensed to Ill cover.
The plane's serial number is "3MTA3."
Held up to a mirror, it reads, "EAT ME."
Visionary artist David Bowie passed away in
January, 2016, but not before leaving the world with one last epic album, Blackstar.
Naturally, the cover features the image of a black star, but there's a little more to
it than that.
According to Jonathan Barnbrook, who designed the cover, the black star was meant to represent
a black hole, which was a metaphor for Bowie confronting his own end.
Barnbrook told Dezeen that the symbol of a black star on white
"...has a sort of finality, a darkness, a simplicity, which is a representation of the
music."
"...the idea of mortality is in there, and of course the idea of a black hole sucking
in everything, the Big Bang, the start of the universe, if there is an end to the universe."
Leave it to Bowie to deliver the ultimate mic drop.
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