Witted feminist deconstruction of the male look or a degrading regression towards the visualization of negative relationship patterns? The large analysis trim was unpacked for the analysis of the cover for Sabrina Carpenter’s new album “Man’s Best Friend”. It was not only controversial on Reddit, but also in the feature pages.
Regardless of how to stand in terms of socio-politically, the singer is part of the sexy Record covers gallery with her provocative scene, which has been part of the visual language of pop culture as a matter of course since the 1960s.
Sex Sells, this maxim of the world admirer world, the music industry cannot write down alone. But their use always remained in the area of tension between the commercial exploitation of nudity and a promise of sexual self -determination. Compromise for the undecided: one does not exist without the other.
Men make music, women take off
Erotized pictures, mostly thematically completely independent of the musical content, always used Pop as a means of generating attention, staging rebellion – and simply to sell plates. The visual vocabulary always seemed to know no limits. It was done what worked, the good taste fell not only with aesthetically successful nude photography.
Only a few examples: naked nymphs on drums, miniature cars that drive over Russ-Meyer hills, women who are bathing in a wide variety of giant glasses.
Hardly necessary to mention that in particular young women, in some times even girls, were and are who are recruiting on the record covers. After the triumphal march of the “Playboy” and its open cultivation of the adding, record cover with such representations massively increased.
The sexyness of the Sixties may still advance the coquette (for Herb ritt “Whipped Cream & other Delights” a beauty in 1965 in whipped cream, but it was still visible underneath), but already in the 1970s it was shown that the sexual liberation initiated at the end of the previous decade was above all an unleashing of the male look.
Wuldable nude representations of all kinds stood in addition to frequently censored subversive variants of progressive sexuality. Nothing had to be hinted at. The Ohio Players let honey, of course, pour honey over for their album “Honey” (1975). Rather, they soaked themselves with it. Because: The visual language of (soft) pornography needed the legitimation through the naturalness of female lust as a staging for the potential male buyer.
Liberated nudity?
The naked ones hit back in the 80s! Aerobics, fitness, and changing ideals of beauty ensured a wave of self-empowerment also with the album artwork of pop music. Madonna plays with the long -time clichés of sexy image aesthetics, she emancipates the always misogynic duality between Heiliger and whore (“Like a Virgin”, 1984), and Prince celebrates nudity as a spiritual revelation (“Lovesexy”, 1988). The question arises much more, who really dominates whom.
In the 90s, the Sexy Record covers are becoming more and more ironic and more quoted. Lil ‘Kim, Janet Jackson and many others use the open sexuality as a power statement that they stage a hyperrealism and a neoliberal body image for their albums, which will last many years later and have only been questioned in recent times. A debate about power relationships, which is only the product of oversaturation of the offer.
From Britney Spears to Christina Aguilera to Lady Gaga, a transformation to digital aesthetics is then formed in the 2000s, the trash image production, along with deliberately artificial sexyness, accepts. Anyone who is able to cathed with the event potential of sexual stimuli is able to show the record covers from the 2010s, you can excited without getting upset.
Fetishes are crossed with visualized empowerment rhetorics, Beyoncé and FKA Twigs are stage as cyborgal amazons, the possibilities of queer reflections find a completely new audience that not only wants to see a game with the expectations, as in the early David Bowie, but also reality references.
Nudity as a weapon in cultural struggle
Despite the nostalgic return to the large-format vinyl covers, the album cover is no longer the preferred battlefield for erotic expansion. Miley Cyrus does not swing and emits for a plate cover on the demolition pear and poses as a splinter fiber and unvarnished brat rather for Instagram and Terry Richardson (before he turned out to be exactly what he presented in his desert pornelzi-as an attacking, dangerous lust).
If Dian Hanson and Eric Godtland for their book “Sexy Record Covers” (Bags, hardcover, 528 pages, 60 euros) Review the story of the sometimes less highly existing artwork for musical albums, then do this with the cheerful look of the record collector who looks through boxes at a flea market and not only takes one or the other record specimen because of the musical qualities.
A cool culture -critical look may be forbidden by itself, it dominates the “performance show”. But also the will to exhibit curious and unconditional. The many preview images are not ordered according to scandal potential or chronological direction. Instead, there is an overview of every genre. This also makes sense from an economic point of view, yet produced jazz and soul a completely different eroticism, which even Charles Mingus was used to boost album sales, as pop and rock.
The Germans, only on the side, are world champions in this discipline, although they are not allowed to estimate beauty prices for themselves. And: humor and sex, that works surprisingly well, over the decades.
Whether this magnificent collecting plant wants to make it clear to us, today you can no longer look at ejaculative interest, but with the ironious awareness that there is good and bad eroticism and can only distinguish connoisseurs here.
However, it is a shame that the recent years have shown a little too miserable in the volume and glorious image products of the subculture are rather treated.
If you need a conclusion after all these image impressions: In addition to its banal stimulus function, eroticism on record covers also reflects social balance, it works as a aesthetic statement and commercial weapon. Today a lot seems more feminist, but it is very rarely radically new, this illustrated this illustrated book very clearly.
