Inner Sleeve: Drew Daniel
- Issue #241 (Mar 04) | Inner Sleeve
- By: Drew Daniel | Featuring: Prince
- Printable version
Prince – 1999 (Warner Brothers, 1982)
Uncredited designer
Aware that a pricey double album of dubious lyrical content might not be my parents’ first choice for an 11th birthday present, I conned my former babysitter into buying me Prince’s “1999” as a parting gift. I knew the song “Little Red Corvette” from watching videos on the pre-MTV cable variety clip show Night Flight, and had to
have this record. Unwrapping it in the afternoon before my friends showed up for the birthday sleepover, I skipped past the purple magic marker doodled cover art (lingering briefly on the rather phallic depiction of the numeral 1) and the suitably magenta-befogged group photo of Prince And The Revolution, only to be was utterly scandalised and captivated by the second inner sleeve photo. There he is, Prince, naked in bed, looking straight at me, preparing to sketch what he sees with a child’s set of watercolours, his bedroom eyes cutting through the fog of dry ice and upstaging the absurd neon wall accents cluttering the scene. Well, he isn’t quite naked — a closer look reveals that he’s wearing some dove grey evening gloves, a formal touch that exacerbates the vulnerability of the glistening buttcrack winking out from the periwinkle sheets. His purple lamé trench coat and spiked guitar strap may be cast aside, but Prince somehow seems more in control than ever. Stand still while I sketch you, he could be saying. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of whoever art directed this shot — instead of Prince being the naked one, with that blank white paper in front of him and the brush in hand, you, the viewer, are his model, you’re the one being viewed. It’s you who stand naked before him. Don’t move a muscle.
Drew Daniel is a member of Matmos and Soft Pink Truth
Uncredited designer
Aware that a pricey double album of dubious lyrical content might not be my parents’ first choice for an 11th birthday present, I conned my former babysitter into buying me Prince’s “1999” as a parting gift. I knew the song “Little Red Corvette” from watching videos on the pre-MTV cable variety clip show Night Flight, and had to
have this record. Unwrapping it in the afternoon before my friends showed up for the birthday sleepover, I skipped past the purple magic marker doodled cover art (lingering briefly on the rather phallic depiction of the numeral 1) and the suitably magenta-befogged group photo of Prince And The Revolution, only to be was utterly scandalised and captivated by the second inner sleeve photo. There he is, Prince, naked in bed, looking straight at me, preparing to sketch what he sees with a child’s set of watercolours, his bedroom eyes cutting through the fog of dry ice and upstaging the absurd neon wall accents cluttering the scene. Well, he isn’t quite naked — a closer look reveals that he’s wearing some dove grey evening gloves, a formal touch that exacerbates the vulnerability of the glistening buttcrack winking out from the periwinkle sheets. His purple lamé trench coat and spiked guitar strap may be cast aside, but Prince somehow seems more in control than ever. Stand still while I sketch you, he could be saying. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of whoever art directed this shot — instead of Prince being the naked one, with that blank white paper in front of him and the brush in hand, you, the viewer, are his model, you’re the one being viewed. It’s you who stand naked before him. Don’t move a muscle.
Drew Daniel is a member of Matmos and Soft Pink Truth
Posted 13/03/04
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