The Cover Uncovered: The harrowing darkness behind Black Flag’s ‘Family Man’
Every artist utilises album covers in a different way. For some, an album cover is little more than an advertisement for the record within, whereas others see the covers as a means of extending their influence into the realm of visual art.
Within the rebellious world of punk rock, artists like Black Flag tended to lean towards the latter, always making full use of their album covers to make a statement or, in many cases, freak people out.
Shock has always been a prevailing tactic of the punk scene in offending the establishment and disrupting the status quo, so it is no surprise that punk album covers tended to lean into that shock value, too. Dead Kennedys, for instance, created an album cover so shocking in 1985’s Frankenchrist that the band attracted a lawsuit, while Black Flag’s 1984 record Slip It In attracted some degree of controversy for including the album title next to an artwork of a nun clutching a naked man’s leg.
Impressively, though, Slip It In was not the most daring album cover Black Flag released back in 1984. That accolade should surely go to Family Man, released mere months before the nun and the naked man ever appeared on record store shelves. Family Man was a particularly leftfield album for Black Flag, seeing the band depart from their typical hardcore punk leanings and adopt a kind of avant-garde spoken word style along with various instrumental recordings on the B-side.
Expectedly, though, Henry Rollins’ spoken-word tracks weren’t exactly slam poetry. Instead, the formidable frontman guides listeners through an increasingly dark narrative focused on, among other things, suburban darkness and a subversion of the nuclear family ideals being pushed by Cold War-era America. The album’s eponymous opening track, for instance, concerns the murder of a ‘Family Man’ and his children, along with the rape of his wife.
For the record’s artwork, the band chose an equally dark, nightmarish cover to suit the content of the album. Raymond Pettibon, the brother of Greg Ginn and the man responsible for virtually all of Black Flag’s memorable artwork, was tasked with creating the artwork, and he delivered perhaps his darkest and most subversive work of all time, featuring a father pointing a gun at his head while his murdered wife and children lay around him covered in blood.
Next to the man’s head is written the date November 23rd, 1963. Although the significance of that date has never overtly been revealed either by the band or Pettibon himself, November 23rd was the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy, which seems to fall in line with the band’s desire to cause shock and controversy – alternatively, November 23rd, 1963, was the date that the first-ever episode of Doctor Who was aired, so perhaps they were simply big fans of cult British sci-fi.
Family Man often goes overlooked within the discography of Black Flag, perhaps owing to its lack of short, sharp, hardcore anthems, of which albums like Damaged were full of. Still, it remains one of the band’s most ambitious and outlandish efforts, more akin to experimental jazz than anything else being created in the punk realm.
At the same time, though, the record perfectly reflected the changing landscape of the punk sound during the mid-1980s, and its harrowing album cover remains one of the most iconic punk covers of that very distinctive era.
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