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| Under the Covers: The Smiths - feature in Stylus Magazine |
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posted by davidt
on Wednesday March 16 2005, @11:00AM
An anonymous person sends the link:
Under the Covers: The Smiths - stylusmagazine.com
Under the Covers is a fortnightly column concerning the packaging, artwork, and design that goes into albums. Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.
The Smiths’ recordings have some of the most consistently compelling and stylistically recognizable record covers in pop music memory. Nearly all of their covers—on singles, records, and collections—bear photographs appropriated from the art world, film stills, or variations of cultural-record-type photography found in books. While each cover’s reference unavoidably ties the band to a specific aesthetic sensibility, there’s also a remarkable formalistic pattern to the series of images. While a book could be written on the subject (and has—Jo Slee’s Peepholism: Into the Art of Morrissey, which is out of print but I’m told is fairly good), in the short space of this column it makes more sense to attend only to the covers of their full-length releases. Special thanks in absentia must be given to Stephane Daigle, whose comprehensive “Coverstars” page contains images and cover information regarding every Smiths and Morrissey release before 1998, and can be found here.
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