Inner Sleeve: DJ Spooky

Record Maker: Pioneering record sleeve designs by Alex Steinweiss

I guess you could say I don’t really like any one specific album cover: I like them all. They represent a kind of ‘logotype’ for me. Think about the DNA of what makes a record sleeve, well, a record sleeve – and you’ll see it’s a paradox of ‘form and function’. Record covers are a kind of mass produced memory, images that strike millions of people with the same sound. Think of them as a data cloud of associations embodied on the blank surface of the LP, a Rorschach blot test for every aspiring DJ.

If you go back to the archetype of the record sleeve, you can see a couple of themes that pop up. First and foremost, what does the image on the cover convey, and why? Does it catch your attention?

One of the unknown heroes of the 20th century is Alex Steinweiss, the ‘inventor’ of the pictorial record sleeve. He got there first – in 1939, when he was appointed the first art director of Columbia Records. Before he came along, records were packaged in plain brown paper.

A couple of years ago, when I was researching graphic design and album covers for a museum show about the history of the record sleeve, I kept coming across Steinweiss’s name. It was uncanny. One art critic liked to call him the man who “almost singlehandedly transformed the drab artless covers of the old 78 rpm record albums into a mass media canvas of infinite creative possibility.” Serious praise indeed.

Steinweiss designed liquor bottles, posters, a magazine, pamphlets, book covers and titles for TV shows, but he’s best known for creating the ‘grammar’ of record sleeves: icon, logo, music, styling and, above all, synthesis of form. It’s pretty hard to think about where the American graphic design scene would be without him. An example: Steinweiss’s cover for the original 1949 Broadway cast recording of South Pacific has been in almost continuous use on every subsequent edition. The only other graphic design in America to be used for so many years is the Coke bottle.

When you look at classic designs, such as Hipgnosis’s work for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, T Rex, etc; or if you go slightly further back to Bauhaus and Black Mountain College artist Josef Albers’s abstract minimalist prototypes for the Persuasive Percussion series of records, which influenced Stereolab’s artwork; or Lemi Ghariokwu’s cartoons for Fela Kuti’s albums, you’re put into a realm where sound and memory intersect without rhyme or reason. What connects all these radically disparate records is one thing: the iconic status of the record cover that Steinweiss conceptualised.

That was the problem of the 20th century – before search engines, before collaborative filters (if you like this album, you’ll like this song…). You had to guess, what image does this sound evoke? What sound does Jamie Reid’s ‘ransom note’ design suggest when you look at the cover of The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks? Of course, in the 21st century, we’re much more enlightened. We have iTunes 8’s Genius function to sort out our artwork, and we’re left with an algorithmic choice of memory.

Think of the LP cover as embodying an aesthetic theory of ‘logotypes’. Marcel Proust presented fictional artists – a novelist, a composer, a painter – and made them into synthetic memories. Andy Warhol made paintings and sculptures out of the detritus of everything and everyone around him, he created films, and sponsored a rock group. Compare the imaginary paintings Proust describes in the studio of Elstir (a minor character in Remembrance Of Things Past) with Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, and think of the record sleeve as lying somewhere between the two. At the end of the DNA strand, we’re left looking for those hidden links. It would serve us well to look back, dig in the crates, and see which logos drift out of the data cloud. I think you’d find Steinweiss sitting at the end of the rabbit-hole. With or without any of your own memories, you’d find him a familiar face nonetheless.

Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid’s book Sound Unbound is published by MIT Press. His Rebirth Of A Nation DVD is out now on Anchor Bay