The greatest rock ‘n’ roll album covers, according to Beck
From his first hit with 1994’s ‘Loser’, California native Beck has risen to the lofty echelons of alternative pop royalty off the back of a body of work that encompasses a dizzying breadth of musical stylings from anti-folk, synthpop, hip-hop collages, and acoustic-psych, a reputation for a postmodern assemblage of disparate genres never daunting any commercial success, Beck a four times platinum-selling artist.
Naturally, Beck has a vast knowledge and fervent interest in the full scope of popular music, and you’d expect a suitably diverse record collection covering “Christian puppet records to classic-rock standbys, early hip-hop to Argentinean indie rock”, according to the man himself.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2013 for a feature on his 50 favourite album covers, Beck ensured he considered his choices on visual merit alone: “My criteria were loose; essentially, I grabbed whatever looked fresh when I pulled it off the shelf. I tried to look at the covers as solely visual media, as if the music they were connected to didn’t exist. How would this look hanging up in a room?”
He added: “Most of these images were never meant to be anything other than objects one stared at for hours, trying to decipher the impenetrable world contained within the music playing back from a grizzled stereo. Maybe this is an adolescent version of the album-listening experience; still, in most cases, it’s impossible to divorce an image from its music.”
Plenty of rock ‘n’ roll makes a feature, a genre that just as easily can lend itself to both brilliant and brilliantly hilarious artwork. In for its tacky tastelessness, German hard rockers Scorpions’ signature album Lovedrive‘s Hipgnosis designed cover of backseat bubblegum stretched breast nipple often features in the ‘worst covers ever’ list (not as abysmal as their Virgin Killer, however). He said: “I think they were trying to one-up those Pink Floyd concept covers, but misfired with this accidental masterpiece.”
Beck offers a fresh take on Aussie clod-rockers AC/DC. Singling out the European cover for Dirty Deeds Done Cheap again by Hipgnosis, its new wave presentation of collaged cutouts is intriguingly at odds with the band’s heavy metal party: “This looks like it could’ve been a Devo or Dead Kennedys cover. It’s interesting to see something so arty from a hard-rock band.”
Rock at its most gratuitously excessive is a criterion for Beck, ticking off The Who’s third LP for inclusion. The Who Sell Out features Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry, respectively, flogging oversized deodorant and a tub of Heinz on the cover, poking fun at their own genuine commercial jingle cuts around the time (Daltry later happy to appear in American Express adverts in the 1980s). “Daltry in the beans is kind of disgusting,” Beck said. “Reminds me of this ridiculous British fetish magazine my old tour manager found on the road years ago, called Splosh!, which featured pictorials of office secretaries at their desks, dousing themselves with high volumes of food, all mish-mashed into a culinary miasma.”
High praise was bestowed upon The Rolling Stones’ ninth album Sticky Fingers. Their first record of the 1970s and featuring immortal cuts like ‘Black Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’, original pressings came with a real zipper on Andy Warhol’s close-up jeans crotch shot of Glenn O’Brien: “This one is a given. The zipper is brilliant. The presence of kit and tackle is definitely felt. Sticky Fingers is my all-time favorite rock-album title as well.”
Jumping to the millennium, Primal Scream’s paranoid-tech finale for Creation Records XTRMNTR clearly has a prominent place in Beck’s affection. Their best work during their harsh-electro phase, the glitched-out cover, illustrates the captivating industrial dance that’s captured within: “This is one of the best covers I’ve seen in the last few years. It takes the rough collage style of early punk records, manipulates it with computers, and flips it around with pop colours. It looks like some geopolitical video game: Gulf War soldiers, pixelated helicopters, and that militaristic, vowel-free typeface.”
