What does it mean to lean in? This year, several R&B artists are taking a relaxed approach to a tradition that goes back decades: soul singers who lounge casually and invitingly on their album covers. The year isn’t even half over yet, and new releases from Eric Bellinger, Durand Bernarr and Ari Lennox show the artists each in exactly this pose – just like Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross and of course Michael Jackson did in the eighties.
Bellinger, who recently released the heartbreaking ballad “Cry in Front of You,” noticed the parallel early on and turned it into a punchline on social media. “Great minds think alike,” he wrote in an Instagram post. He did this by placing the cover of his upcoming self-titled album, planned for this summer, in a grid next to Bernarr’s cover and “Thriller.”
“Since this project is my self-titled album, I knew the cover had to be something classic,” he tells ROLLING STONE via email. “I took a much more personal and vulnerable path this time, so my first thought was to channel the energy of the greats like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Luther Vandross and Teddy Pendergrass and bring back the legendary LEAN.”
A pose with a story
The pose has been a trademark of R&B singers since at least Aretha Franklin’s 1979 LP “La Diva,” and Teddy Pendergrass followed up with a particularly seductive look on the cover of his 1981 album “It’s Time for Love.” Lennox captures Franklin’s self-confidence and composure almost perfectly on the cover of her new album “Vacancy”.
But of course it was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” that made the pose iconic the following year. Dick Zimmerman, the “Thriller” cover photographer, said the entire shoot lasted six or seven hours and really got going when Jackson asked to wear his white suit – an echo of Pendergrass. Then they just played around with different poses and a tiger cub. Finally, Quincy Jones chose the cover image.
In the years that followed, more and more artists followed suit. Richie also leaned in on the cover of his 1982 “You Are” single, Finis Henderson III posed with an old-fashioned microphone as a prop on the cover of his 1983 album “Finis,” and Vandross tried it on 1986’s “Give Me the Reason.” However, the trend died down towards the end of the 1980s.
Lean as a rite
When Bellinger realized he was part of a tower of leaning singers this year, his first impulse was to shoot a new cover. “But as I prayed about it and thought about it longer, I remembered that my original inspiration was a greatness that we all strive to emulate,” he says. “And I started to feel the like-minded connection and rebirth among the lords of R&B, and honestly I felt like it was just necessary to release mine into the world and let the people decide. I was blown away by how people got behind me and supported my original idea of KEEPING THE LEAN!”
On Bernarr’s funky new single “Am I Okay?!” he sings: “For a small piece of your time, I’ll pay a fee / Just to sit here on this couch and bare my soul.” On the cover of “Bernarr.” However, he doesn’t sit – he leans. He finds the coincidence with other artists in the same pose amusing. “The funny thing about Eric: We met a few weeks before the release and he told me that he also did the lean,” he tells Rolling Stone via email. “I encouraged him to still stick with his vision because it’s almost a rite of passage to lean on your album cover at least ONCE!”
“2026 is absolutely the year of the (shoulder) LEAN!” he added.
Photographer about the icon
Photographer Juan Veloz, who shot Bernarr’s cover, says his goal was to imitate the classics – he cites Jackson’s, Vandross’ and Richie’s covers as inspiration. “The moment we saw that Lean pose, we knew the album was going to be iconic!” he says. “We took inspiration from the original and made it our own – from styling to set design to lighting to capturing the true essence of Durand.”
The origins of the pose, at least in the context of “Thriller,” were recently discussed when the Internet discovered the self-titled 1982 debut album by R&B artist Alfonzo Jones – a singer with a Michael Jackson-like voice who apparently released his self-titled debut months before “Thriller,” with a cover that also shows him leaning against it. Jones himself says the pose came about organically; he and others agree that the similarities were most likely a coincidence.
Questlove, who spoke to ROLLING STONE about “Alfonzo,” offered a theory as to why the look was so popular. “Luther, Lionel and Teddy Pendergrass and so on – maybe lying on the floor was just the ‘serious pose,'” Questlove told Rolling Stone. “I did a lot of research on the ‘Thriller’ cover, and I was told that Michael’s ‘Thriller’ pose was almost an afterthought. … The lying down had more to do with accommodating the tiger that Michael really wanted on the cover.”
Zimmerman’s final word
“Alfonzo may have been influenced by my cover art, but after 44 years, I feel that ‘Thriller’ has outlived many more visual and musical similarities, and perhaps will survive any future plagiarism!” Zimmerman told Rolling Stone.
