I’ve never been really much of a fan of music videos
and I think that’s because I sort of just like my music as music.
I like to close my eyes and focus on what’s happening sonically.
Because that’s what music is: it’s something that you hear.
So, that means I can totally be engrossed and in love with Beyonce’s latest album
and not care at all about the dozen videos that came out with it.
But I don’t know, maybe I’m in the minority here.
And the truth is, that, despite music being an aural medium,
it’s long had an intimate relationship with the visual.
So I want to talk about perhaps the most iconic visual supplement in the history of music.
But, before we talk about that, what about album covers in general?
These days we perceive them as a kind of visual statement like the album title or the song names
that help us situate the tone or the feeling of what we're going to hear.
Granted that it stays within the dimension of a square, the options and styles are basically limitless.
But in the beginning, record packaging was purely utilitarian.
The early 78-RPM gramophone records were mostly outfitted with brown paper or cardboard sleeves
to protect the recording.
It wasn't until 1938 when Columbia Records hired Alex Steinweiss as its very first art director
that the idea of cover art came into existence.
Against the plain or traditional design of early covers, Steinweiss' original, eye-catching art
initiated just a huge boom in sales and the market followed, as it always does when something works.
Record stores were refigured so that instead of just seeing the bindings, like books on a shelf,
consumers were encouraged to flip through the covers.
This all points to just how important the cover art was to the marketing of the product.
And music *is* a product, it's a commodity that people consume.
And since you can't buy the band itself, and since the music has no spatial dimension,
the album cover emerged as the stand-in for the commodity to be purchased.
This explains the rise of photography on album covers in what's called 'the peronality cover'.
You know, one of those covers where it's just a photograph of the band or musician,
still pretty popular today.
A perfect example of this personality cover can be seen on the Beatles' first album 'Please Please Me'.
Just look at those bright, smiling faces staring warmly into the camera lens.
As Susan Sontag once brilliantly said,
"In its simplest form, we have ina a photograph
surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing"
As their career advanced, The Beatles seemed to become darkly aware of their status as commodities.
Perhaps nowhere more plainly acknowledged than on the cover of their fourth album, aptly titled "Beatles For Sale"
Featuring another example of the personality cover, this time without the warmth and the smiles.
By the time Sgt. Pepper's emerged,
The Beatles had already begun challenging the conventions of popular music and its role in culture
And this extended to the album covers, too.
First, in Rubber Soul, with its distorted image and funky typeface,
Then with Revolver, for which they employed their friend and artist Klaus Voormann
who did a kind of 1960s update of Victorian illustrator
Aubrey Beardsley's famous black ink drawings.
In other words, The Beatles were leaders in expanding an album cover's function
from a marketing tool, to a work of art in its own right.
And that brings us back to what is really the Holy Grail of album covers:
The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'
A cover that explicitly engages the audience in so many ways:
in critiques, in interpretations, in comparisons, in contrasts;
It's a cover that invites you in.
A perfect example of this is the immediate challenge to just identify who all of these people are.
What do Indian gurus, Karl Marx, and Bob Dylan all have in common?
The Sgt. Pepper's cover wants you to ask questions like this.
Now in one sense, of course, these people just represent The Beatles' interests and influences.
Many of whom didn't make the final cut.
And yet, by juxtaposing highbrow artists and thinkers, like Marx, or Aubrey Beardsley,
or George Bernard Shaw or Dylan Thomas
with pop icons, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Shirley Temple,
The Beatles signal the breakdown and mixing of high and low culture
that they themselves exemplified more than any other artist.
With Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles were in a posture of challenge,
challenging everything they'd been up to that point,
challenging the highbrow art critics to abandon their exclusion of popular culture,
challenging the listening public to engage
with something other than love songs in the same four chords.
They were even challenging the feelings of unity
that defined the summer of love in 1967,
delivering a suite of songs that featured alienation and loss
as much as it did love and togetherness.
The album cover echoes these challenges and adds
some of its own
by using the technique of photomontage
which manipulates photography's unique ability to depict reality,
The Beatles blend and collapse
the values of a number of different times and places.
By staging the scene as a performance and an audience,
the band challenges us to dwell on the function of both.
Indeed, these considerations were at the front of their minds as The Beatles had only recently elected
to stop performing live, after the mayhem of Beatlemania
began to diminish the quality of the music.
While some accuse them of leaving their fans behind,
the Sgt.Pepper's cover suggests the opposite:
that the decision to stop touring was out of respect for their fans
not out of fear or contempt.
We should also note that the designer of this cover, Peter Blake,
was a noted pop artist,
a style that used aspects of mass culture
to bring attention to the fuzzy lines between art, advertising, news, and all other forms of media.
The pop artist wanted to get people to think about the process and manufacturing of art,
and how its categorizations and hierarchies are largely arbitrary.
Blake and The Beatles designed the Sgt. Pepper cover as both a piece of art, and a product:
inside its gatefold sleeve, the record had paper cutouts of the Pepper Band's regalia,
adding to its consumer kitch value.
And yet, it was also the first album to display the lyrics on the packaging,
encouraging listeners to interrogate the record's intellectual content as well.
Now the truth is, of course, that music,
perhaps more prominently than any other art form
plays both parts:
as a commodity, and an aesthetic object.
And in many ways, the two functions are inseparable.
The Beatles knew this, now maybe they regretted it,
but they were self-aware enough to see that it was inescapable.
And if music had to be marketed,
and if the visual was going to be the vehicle of that,
John, Paul, George, and Ringo were going to be as playful here as they were with everything else.
In the end this photograph of photographs levels a critique on representation itself.
To show how music is mediated by the visual,
the Beatles put themselves on this cover three times.
Once as the wax figures of the mop-top Beatles that they were,
once as the fake Pepper band, in its bright and eye-catching glory,
and finally, as themselves,
pictured not on the cover of their album, but by the effects of that cover.
In the minds of everyone who looked at it.
The real Beatles can't be represented this way, not really.
Not like this, or like this, or like this.
The cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band points to the truth,
what the Beatles themselves knew: ['A Day in the Life' starts playing]
that all music
is invisible.
John Lennon: [I read the news today, oh boy]
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