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As of last year, Apple announced that it had sold over 225 million iPods, writes Bianca Camminga. Since the rise of electronic music, luddites across the globe have been heralding the end of the album, compact disc and, well, life as we know it.

Fair enough, the last CD I actually walked out of HMV with was the Westlife box set. My mother’s a fan. I was very careful to wear my ‘don’t-you-dare-ask-me-if-need-any-assistance-shirt’ that day.

Browsing through the pop and soft rock section, easily interchangeable with the words pop and soft porn, I realised that these album covers were vile. Worse still, covered in sweaty paw prints they seemed to have been thumbed through but never actually purchased. Obviously some desperate emo kid had been here before me.

It struck me that with all these albums still sitting here, the closing down of Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus and Lilly Allen’s refusal to make another album until ‘someone pays up innit’ that some conspiracy was afoot.

And what is the album to queers anyway? Probably very little; our musical history weighs heavily on musicals, the 80s and angry/ instrumental girl music columns. We have, however had a huge influence on album art. I would bet that this is probably the same reason we loved the 80s so much: asymmetrical hair, shoulder pads, make up, girls will be boys will be girls and everything in between. And where did we see this? The album cover.

Album artwork

Once upon a time albums were total projects, painstakingly made to purvey some kind of message. That message included a cover.

Take Patti Smith’s album Horses for instance. The cover art was taken by the controversial erotic photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. Shot one afternoon after running home from a local coffee shop ‘to catch the light’, the picture shows an androgynous Smith ‘suited and booted’, jacket slung over shoulder looking like she would be ‘the shane’ at your local gay bar.

When the record company saw the cover they naturally demanded that Smith change it. According to Clive Davis the label executive for Arista Records at the time, it raised the following problems:

1) Girl singers were supposed to look sexy and beautiful, at the very least like girls
2) Not only was Smith wearing a man’s tie, but she hadn’t even bothered to put on makeup
3) Smith has a slight line of facial hair on her upper lip. Yes, Smith was rocking the ‘tache

This could only mean one thing: the album cover was sending out the ‘wrong message’.

Smith refused to change the cover stating that the picture represented everything that the album was trying to say, a bold move for a first release. The audience she was trying to reach needed that ‘wrong message’. Years later this cover would become known as the image that radically altered the pervading stereotype of what it meant to be a ‘girl singer’.

Gay art critic Paul Taylor was astounded the first time he saw the cover and simply had to own the album. “I saw Horses in a record store in Australia, and immediately fell in love with the picture. I don’t know anything about Patti Smith or about punk, but I bought the album on the strength of the photograph.”

Bowie, Boy George, Prince and Grace Jones: they were all trying to sell the ‘wrong message’ in some way. I am advocating for a quiet revolution. When Apple offers you the choice of buying or not buying the album sleeve, buy it, because the art counts.

Album covers have been central signifiers to queer communities, a window into a world, suggesting there may just be a little more on offer inside the box than they think. The argument is always going to be over whether or not these artists harnessed ‘queer’ to sell themselves as living on the edge or not.

I think there is another side to this though; that of wide spread consumerism from varied groups of people regardless of the often very clear sexual messaging taking place. Boys could look like girls and girls could look like boys, and the public, at large, bought it.

Posted in: Exclusives, Music |