Album Covers

Wikipedia's definition of an album cover is, "An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially released audio recording product, or album".
 This is true as it is done as a marketing scheme and technique to attract an audience with their own design of the album cover but i think they have a a much deeper meaning as bands cannot carelessly design an album cover without any thought processes or planning. Album covers are the last of the "olden technology" that we have outgrown its one of the only things in music that we can actually touch as most is done by technology through electronics. An album cover and cd's replaced vinyl records and their packaging while computers and Itunes look set to over take cd's unless they already have.

History
Before 1938, album covers had just a brown envelope rather the pictures and letters now it shows how much times have changed. They were created by Alex Steinweiss who created the first proper cd cover 1939 he designed the first major cd cover for a collection of songs by Roger and Hart. Alex was the first person to come up with an illustrated design for a cd cover and his design and idea was patented shortly after.

A good example of an album cover that I personally like is the Album cover from Funkadelic called Maggot brain, although not the type of music i particularly enjoy the album artwork makes me enjoy it because of its humour. The album is done very comically with an image of a woman coming out of the ground...like a maggot or worm does, but the woman keeps in touch with the Funkadelic name as she is smiling, happy and has a cool afro whcih is what we tend to associate with the word Funky.

I enjoy this album artwork as it doesnt tell us anything about the music inside and is rather pointless which ties in to a theory of Post Modernism covered by Moe Syzlack that states that "Post modernism is weird for werids own sake" meaning something does not have to have a meaning it can just be weird because it is. Either way i enjoy this cover as its comical and mocks the albums name in a parody style way.