Pink floyd the wall album cover 300 x3 00
This time, the image comes not from the pop artist himself, but from his protégée Paul Morrissey-a still from his salacious, Warhol-produced film Flesh. Of the many millions of bands inspired by that first Velvets’ release, The Smiths also looked to Warhol for inspiration when it came to the even more suggestive album cover (above) for their first, self-titled record in 1984. It’s a gamble that hardly paid off for the label, but pop music is infinitely better off for Warhol’s promotion of Lou Reed and company’s dark, droning art rock. The cover originally featured a yellow banana record buyers could peel away, as Flavorwire writes, “to reveal a suggestively pink flesh-toned banana.” The “saucy covers” required “special machinery, extra costs, and the delay of the album release,” but Warhol’s name persuaded MGM the added overhead was worth it. Long before Artpop, there was Warhol, whose promotion of the Velvet Underground included his own design of their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Such, of course, was the case with the much-ballyhooed cover of Lady Gaga’s Artpop, a candy-colored collaboration with pop art darling Jeff Koons, who gets a namecheck in the Gaga single “Applause.” Gaga has put a unique spin on the mélange of pop and pop art, but she hardly pioneered such collaborations. Though these creative personalities work in a primarily commercial vein, there’s no reason not to call their products fine art.īut in a great many cases, the images that grace the covers of records we know well come directly from the fine art world-whether appropriated from pieces that hang on museum walls or commissioned from famous artists by the bands. We could add to these American references the iconic covers of European graphic artists like Peter Saville of Joy Divisions’ Unknown Pleasures and Storm Thorgerson of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.These names represent just a small sampling of the many renowned designers who have given popular music its distinctive look over the decades, and without whom the experience of record shopping-perhaps itself a bygone art-would be a dreary one. The art of the album cover is ground we cover here often enough, from the jazz deco creations of album art inventor Alex Steinweiss to the bawdy burlesques of underground comix legend R.