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A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

RYM’s next choice for best Jazz album of all time is John Coltrane’s spiritually-inspired masterpiece, A Love Supreme. This record is very important for Trane’s story as well as the development of spiritual and modal jazz. And it’s a personal favorite too!

I’m a big fan of spiritual jazz, I think there’s an added element of personal connection and emotion that purely technical jazz just doesn’t have for me. While I can appreciate the skillful playing in other avant-garde jazz records, it’s players like John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, or Alice Coltrane that can really make me connect to the music. This is a great record, highly recommend to anyone trying to get into avant-garde jazz.

Now, deserved praise for the music aside, what about the cover? I’m not gonna lie, especially out of the context of the great albums lists this cover usually shows up, it’s pretty boring. When I’m looking through a Rolling Stones list or RYM’s top albums of all time, this is an interesting reprieve from the various colors and artistic visions. But on its own, it really does just look like a strangely cropped photo of John Coltrane.

There’s just so little going on. The entire thing is simple black-and-white, the text is nondescript, the division between artist’s name and album name being a “ / “ is odd, the background of the photo is blurry and indescribable, and there’s that weird white slash in the foreground bottom left corner. The only part I appreciate is John Coltrane himself, who has a serious expression and is somewhat interestingly posed, even if basically all of his body is cut off. But even then, he’s not playing the horn or anything, there’s literally nothing to tell something that this is an intentionally created album artwork other than the text. If you removed that, this could just be an oddly cropped photo of a very intense relative that you find on a shelf in your grandparent’s house. The version I have here also has the “impuse!” sticker in the top right, and not every version I could find on the internet had that. For my money this sticker, which I only included because the one on RYM’s chart has it, only makes the cover worse. It feels out of place and sits oddly above Trane’s head.

Revolver by The Beatles

In the time since my Abbey Road review I have, as promised, done a bit of a Beatles deep dive. I definitely have more to explore, but for now I have at least listened to the first couple Beatles records in this list. And out of the ones I have listened to so far, Revolver is definitely my favorite. It’s once again an older record that I just don’t have the full context for, and so will probably never love it the same way so many people do. But it’s definitely good, and I can appreciate that even when The Beatles make a bad song (looking at you, Yellow Submarine), it manages to at least be very interesting.

This album also used to have my favorite cover from The Beatles. I say used to because for a while, I just saw its shrunk-down version on streaming services or websites, and thought it was cool. It was only when I actually pulled up a larger image and looked at it closer that things changed a bit.

I know psychedelia and trippy imagery are The Beatles forté, but this one is kind of a lot for me. I do like it better than the Sgt. Pepper’s cover, the monotone palette makes Revolver leagues better in my opinion. But I’m still not a fan of this type of collage. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good collage. But for me a good collage feels a lot more seamless. That’s just a personal taste thing, I know plenty of people like this style. But I think the drawing parts are just so good and I wish that’s what the whole cover was. The photos just take a lot away from this for me, and even the ones that I kind of like, like the little guys sitting on top of George Harrison’s head, I would like better if they were in the same line art style.

The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground and Nico

PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE

Andy Warhol is one of my top picks for most overrated creatives of all time. I know the whole point of pop art is to be ironic and criticize consumerist culture, but I really just can’t bring myself to care. His work is broadly uninteresting to me, and I’ve never really been a fan of the brand of criticism that says “what if I criticize something by doing… the exact same thing?!?”. That being said, I think sponsoring The Velvet Underground is one of the best things Warhol ever did. They were genuinely experimental for their time and very influential. Their music isn’t my favorite, but it's hard to deny the impact. Also, Nico was a pretty singular artist for her time, and her contributions to this record shouldn’t be overlooked. That’s about all I have to say on the music side of things, I honestly haven’t looked into the story of this record beyond the pretty basic surface level, so I’m not gonna try to give a half-assed opinion on one of the most-discussed albums of all time.

Instead I’ll be talking about the album cover, created by Mr. Warhol himself. Here he puts his signature style into an interesting space, this artwork feels more similar to the abstract and absurdist movements than it does to pop art. I appreciate that approach a lot, this cover is definitely intriguing. And, in its own way, it is very iconic. In terms of underground music and experimental rock, this album’s legendary status has helped it become very recognizable. It’s nowhere near the levels of iconic as Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon, but that’s more due to its somewhat underground (and gatekept) nature. But it has the same qualities as a lot of those famous album covers, it’s a very simple and replicable image that can be put on pretty much anything with a white background.

Honestly, this cover has a lot going for it visually and culturally. My one sticking point is, once again, Andy Warhol. He really just had to put his name smack dab on the cover, huh? Couldn’t be content with a credit on the back of the record, no he had to make this album even more confusing to the uninitiated. I’m of the opinion that any text on the cover of an album that isn’t the artist’s name or the title of the album really needs to have a good stylistic reason to be there, and in this case I don’t see a very good reason other than Andy Warhol’s ego. The other text though, “PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE” is great, it once again adds to the absurdist feeling of the art. The whole thing reminds me a lot of René Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images”.

Illmatic by Nas

Part of the reason I’m really enjoying doing this series so far is that I get to really evaluate classic album covers as more than just images attached to music. Ilmatic is a great example of a cover that I think gets overlooked because the music gets so much praise. Actually I think that’s the case for a lot of rap album cover arts, Drake and Kanye are some of the only artists I can think of that really get a lot of attention for what they put on the covers of their albums. Otherwise, I don’t see a lot of critical analysis of hip-hop visual art, which I think is kind of interesting.

Anyways, here I feel like I may get into my first straight up negative review of an album. Not of the music of course, 90s hip-hop may not be my thing, but it’s hard to deny this as one of the best-written rap albums ever made. But that cover art though...

Like realistically, what is going on here? This is Nas’ origin story, so he’s got the picture of himself as a kid, and the album is very much centered in his hometown of New York, so he has the urban landscape in the background. And there’s his name, and the name of the album. Everything important is here. But when all of those pieces are put together, I don’t know. I think I like this cover less the more I look at it.

I said it yesterday with the Mingus album, but part of my problem is always going to be that I have a modern sense of design. I can’t look at older design choices and not compare them to what current artists and designers are doing. And so I’ll just say straight up, I really don’t like a lot of older hip-hop imagery. If you do like, and there’s plenty of people that do, that’s totally fine and all power to you. I think there’s absolutely a huge market for it and it can be very meaningful to people. I’m not gonna come in here and tell people that this is objectively bad design, cause that’s just not true and I don’t have any place saying it. What I will say instead is that, in my opinion, I just don’t like the over-the-top, maximalist, goofy style of like 90s-2000s rap mixtape and album artwork. It’s too much for me, and while I might find it kind of funny sometimes, I don’t enjoy it for much else beyond that.

And Illmatic is not the worst offender in my eyes by any means. It’s definitely trying to be a lot more serious than say We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 by Clipse. It’s got a raw, dusty color palette (probably the best thing about it, and something I actually really like), it’s got a somewhat unsettling photo of a 7-year-old Nas, it’s got a dramatic flair to the font. It’s trying to create a mood, and I think it mostly succeeds. But to my eyes there are a couple of huge flops that really bring this cover down.

I’ll start with the text, which I think is definitely the worst part of this cover. The placement is alright, I’ve got a bad photo here that for some reason crops Nas’ name right up next to the border and I don’t think that’s normally how it looks. So I’m not bothered about that. What is an issue to me is the font, or rather fonts, that are used here. Why are there three of them? I had this same problem with The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, but it’s even worse here because not only are there three fonts that are each only used for between three and five letters, but all three are different colors and different sizes. And the fonts for “ill” and “nas” are similar enough that I don’t understand why a different one was used. “nas” has a black border around it because it was made a color that is very similar to the photo collage in the background, which bugs me because like, just make it black or white like the other text, then it would all fit together a bit more, right? I don’t know, the text really bothers me the more I look at it, I think it really takes away from what otherwise would be a decently striking superimposed collage. But put all together it just is not it.

The superimposed photos themselves are alright. I think the one of Nas is actually very good, it's really interesting and the most memorable part of the art (alongside the color palette) by far. But the background, the city street, it’s just very mediocre to me. Especially for how important the city is to the story of this album, it feels like more than half the photo is just the sky above and an empty street below. You get a glimpse of some nondescript buildings and cars in the middle section, but nothing about this is interesting. It doesn’t even look like New York to me, if I knew nothing about Nas this photo could be of any random city anywhere.

Also, while the placement of Nas’ portrait is definitely interesting, and I like the way the space in the middle of the street lines up with his forehead, I still feel like if a better urban landscape photo was chosen there could have been a much better and more interesting collage that could be made.

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus

Out of Rate Your Music’s top albums so far, this is the first one that doesn’t fit into any subgenre within Rock or Hip-Hop. I think there’s probably some very interesting criticism that someone smarter than me could level about how RYM is dominated by mostly male users and their opinions on music. Rock and Hip-Hop are the most popular genres among men on average, so it makes sense that the “greatest albums of all time” according to RYM fall mostly within those genres, even if they are experimental or alternative versions.

Anyways, I don’t really want to write a whole essay dissecting the various flaws of a stupid music rating website, so let’s talk about RYM’s favorite jazz record of all time, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, arranged by Charles Mingus.

This record is great. Of course it is, it's this high for a reason. It’s got a different feel than some of the other jazz albums that I’ll talk about later, Mingus was working with a much larger group than most of his contemporaries and the music ends up exploring many more spaces and feeling a lot larger and grander because of it. Personally, I think I appreciate the spiritual jazz of Pharaoh Sanders and John Coltrane a bit more, but I’m also not a huge jazz-head, and definitely don’t appreciate all the subtleties. I’m okay with that though, I’m sure I’ll get better at it as I listen to more great jazz, and for now I’m fine just sticking to album cover reviews.

So what about that cover? This one is pretty simple, it’s a photograph that almost looks like a painting, with a bit of text and a very plain background. Like a lot of older records, including ones I’ve already reviewed like Abbey Road and Ziggy Stardust, I think my current expectations for design and aesthetic are definitely getting in the way of appreciating this cover for what it was when it was made. But at the same time, I’m only here to give my opinion, so I can only really judge it by my standards. And my standards tell that this album, while it does fall into the “picture of the artist with text” genre of cover, it’s at least a nice and somewhat interesting version of that. The portrait is really cool, Mingus looks very smooth, relaxed but powerful, and it’s a great way to introduce him as the orchestrator of the music that’s to come. The text is alright, I like the font and placement of his name, but the name of the album is in a different, very boring font and I feel like a slightly different placement would make it more readable. The smaller text underneath is in another version of the title text’s font, so we’ve got three different fonts in three different type sizes sitting all right below each other, which is a strange choice. The color choices are nice though, and it's overall not a bad cover. Just kind of boring and with weird text choices. I personally think a more maximalist cover might convey the feeling of the music better, if I hadn’t listened to this I would have guessed that this is just one cool dude playing the saxophone (I know Mingus was a bassist, but that also isn’t conveyed by the cover at all). Bonus points for being a really good portrait and an example of nice photography, but it’s still not my favorite cover.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie

Ziggy ziggy ziggy.

Here we have the first album on this list that I own a vinyl copy of, and another one of my all-time favorite from the years before I was born. This is the birth of one of Glam Rock’s all time great characters, Ziggy Stardust, otherwise known as David Bowie.

David Bowie’s body of work is pretty unmatched in music in my opinion, he’s both one of the most prolific solo artists in any genre and one of the most consistent. This is his first of three perfect albums in my opinion, and while it's not his first studio release overall, it does feel like the moment he really entered his own and became one of the greats. His preceding record Hunky Dory is also pretty good, but nothing else from the Glam Rock era really comes close to Ziggy Stardust for me.

Before I listened to the vinyl that came with my record player, my experience with this album was pretty much limited to its hits. And while “Starman”, “Suffragette City”, and especially “Moonage Daydream” all have very special places in my heart, this album as a whole listen is really special. Bowie here just hits that perfect mark between almost being too corny and over the top, and the instrumentation is just so rocking and experimental and beautiful that he completely blows past goofiness and enters real greatness. I love this album a lot, it can often feel like a cheat code for making me happy, and owning a physical copy is always special.

But again, I’m trying not to talk about the music too much, especially for albums that I’ve listened to a lot and love a lot. So what about that cover?

Remain in Light by Talking Heads

“Take a look at these hands!"

Presenting Talking Heads and their 1980 masterpiece, Remain in Light. I’ll be the first to admit that older music often goes over my head. I just don’t have the context for it, and I can really only compare it to modern iterations that have built on what was made in the past. That’s why I don’t love Pink Floyd or The Beatles or The Velvet Underground the way many music nerds do. They just don’t hit me the same way those who were influenced by them do.

However...

Sometimes there’s just something that gets made and never gets replicated. When I want to listen to prog, I’m more likely to go to black midi than Pink Floyd. For psychedelic pop, Weyes Blood always hits me harder than the Beatles. But the spaces explored by Talking Heads are incredibly unique, at least to me. And this album really takes it to another level. This is the Loveless of New Wave and Post-Punk to me, a true pioneer that is rarely if ever topped within its respective lane. I have a lot of love for this record, and I have to say, the album cover plays a not-insignificant role in that.

Especially when I compare this cover to Talking Heads’ other work, it is something special. The combination of photography, text, and of course the incredibly unique glitchy tears sits in a very interesting place that for my money, fits the music perfectly. Talking Heads have an amazing mix of unserious goofiness and chillingly cold commentary, and the choice to rip their own pictures apart this way helps create a visual motif that slides right along in the same groove as their music. The color choices also work great, I especially love the various shades of blue. The whole thing feels whimsical and sinister at the same time, and depending on how deeply you pay attention to David Byrne’s lyrics, you can get both those vibes out of the music. For me, as a consummate lyric ignorer most of the time, I like the element that the cover adds, it makes me remember that Talking Heads aren’t just a goofy nerd rock band singing about weird shit. They have something to say, and I credit Remain in Light for helping me realize that.

Abbey Road by The Beatles

Well, here we go.

Abbey Road is one of the most iconic albums of all time. Considered by many to be the best album from arguably the best (and definitely most famous and influential) band of all time, there’s no way this album and its cover couldn’t be in talks for the best of all-time. This is another one that is so talked-about that I really can’t add too much to the conversation. I’m also very much not a Beatles superfan. I don’t dislike them or consider them overrated like some, but I’m also definitely too young to care a lot about them. They’re so far past my time that the people they influence are some of my favorite artist’s influences. My experience with their catalogue is very limited, and while I have plans to change that at some point soon (I’m working my way through a lot of contemporary psychedelic music right now, but I’m eventually going to get to them), I haven’t begun that journey yet.

With all that in mind, I may come back to revise this cover review later. I certainly will have to do that with Revolver and Sergeant Pepper’s, albums I’ve spent even less time with. But in this case I do feel like I have a decent amount to say, given how normal this cover is in comparison to some of the British Invader’s other works.

This is a case similar to Dark Side of the Moon, albeit in a different way. This cover is on many a shirt, I’m sure. However it doesn’t really have that iconographic quality that DSotM or similar covers have. Instead this cover is made iconic by its association with The Beatles and status as their last real record. It’s definitely the last one that gets praised a lot, and obvious it gets enough acclaim to land just outside RYM’s top ten. And for this album, I very much think this is a case of those outside factor’s carrying the iconic quality of the cover far beyond the artistic quality of the cover itself.

Not to say that it’s a bad cover by any means. Especially for the time, this is pretty quality, and it hits in the same way that albums like Weezer (the blue album) would hit later on. The meme-ability is off the charts here and I think that’s given it lasting staying power for modern audiences. But let’s be honest here for a second: If this was some random album in the middle of a random band’s discography, would it be good? I think in a vacuum, this is just a fine album cover. Because its The Beatles, they get away with just having a photo of them crossing the street. But without that influence, this cover doesn’t have a lot special going for it. The outfits and stances are a little bit heightened, this obviously isn’t a candid photo, it was set up and shot intentionally. But its also not heightened enough to really feel super special. The guys aren’t positioned perfectly evenly like the Weezer cover, the background isn’t particularly interesting like other photographic covers I’ve talked about (thinking of TPAB here) and the color palette really doesn’t speak to any specific vibe or emotion that this record might be touching on.