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~ Drinking out of the hose since 2004 ~ Lounging on the couch since 2007 ~
Motherfucking Album Covers
“Uncle Beppo! Didn’t you already write a piss poor article on covers?”
Yes, my stupid and perfectly oven-shovable child, I did… But that was about song covers, this epic piece is about fucking ALBUM covers. Pay the fuck attention.
“Uncle Beppo, what is an al-“
That’s it. Into the oven you go. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, for birthing an idiot generation. Maybe we can eat them?
Albums were once the format onto which music was inscribed a thousand or so years ago. Back in the day when people wrote something called songs, and hooked them up with riffs and lyrics that mattered (but not always fucking rhymed) and then fucking tied it all up in one neat package with a really cool fucking cover.
Many, many times as a little Beppo child did I prowl my local RECORD store, gazing in fucking wonder and amazement at the mysterious and intriguing album covers that nobly looked down at me from the towering shelves like evil fucking emperors daring me to worship them. And I did. I worshiped them all. Every motherfucking one of them. I would take my loot home, carefully take the first album out of the bag, slide the vinyl out of its clinging sleeve, listening to the static as it let go, smell the wax of wonders to come, place it on the turn table with a reverent anticipation and then just lose myself in the majesty of…
… Molly Hatchet?
What the fuck?
There’s a bloody Viking on the cover, slaughtering his opponents! There’s even blood dripping from the blade of his mighty axe! Why in the fucking hell of Country Music Satan are these assholes allowed to sport such metal attributes? That is motherfucking false advertising if you ask me (and you do, as always). Never mind kids getting cancer from psoriasis ointments – this is the shit the Better Business Bureau should be dedicating all their fucking time to.
All right… I would realize my mistake (although it wasn’t fucking mine, now, was it?) and instead take the next album out, repeat the procedure, listen to the wonderful snap, crackle and pop of the needle making close third kind encounter with the track and just immerse myself in the metal mayhem of…
… The Grateful Dead?
What in the name of Hippie retardery is this shit? Skeletons and shit on the cover, and yet we are riding the fucking Mystery Machine with Shaggy and the Bong Gang. I want to be that monkey they eat in the jungles of Africa; strapped alive under a table, with only his head sticking up through a hole in the middle, cranium sawn open with brains laid bare for some dumb Kunta Kinte fuck to eat. Maybe that would erase the defilement of what this musical penis cheese has done to me.
So, what is my fucking point?
Nothing, other than that it used to be fucking EXCITING to shop for music just based on the rock’n’roll mythos and all the stigmas it carried. Basically, you could pick great albums, from bands you had never fucking heard of, just based on the album cover. If you were a thrash metal band, you depicted blood and mayhem on the cover. If you were a progressive rock band, you had images of mysterious fucking modern sculptures and intricate shit representing your music. Art rock bands had fantasy shit with dragons and little trolls and other D&D crap, and Iron Maiden had Eddie.
Fucking Eddie.
Just sayin’…
If it wasn’t for fucking Eddie, I probably wouldn’t ever have been a fucking metal head. I would probably have been Bartholomew von Blitzermann, reviewing Carrie Underwood's new CD, and fucking loving it, wetting my pocket protector over the fucking thing. Eddie changed all that. He hypnotized me (like some big gay demon Copperfield) from the cover of “The Number of the Beast”, and there was no turning back ever after. That album sounded EXACTLY like its cover: dark, evil, epic and like nothing else.
It was after that I embarked upon my gay album cover journey in music land, and found fucking gems that most of you assholes have never heard of: Satan’s “Court in the Act”, Helloween’s “Walls of Jericho”, Flotsam and Jetsam’s “Doomsday for the Deceiver”, Slayer’s “Hell Awaits”, Magnum’s “On a Storyteller’s Night” and too many others too fucking mention. I bought Running Wild, Grave Digger, Malice, Heathen, Artch, Mercyful Fate and Sinner only because their album covers rocked, and I banged my head so fucking hard my personality split a couple of times in the process. I acquired the likes of Yes, Magnum, Fates Warning and Watchtower, just because the cover looked like it would represent something I could get into. And I was right… I think my fucking IQ went up at least 10 points just by trying to catch up with the musical dreamscapes of those fucking albums.
The days of glorious album covers past.
Nowadays we have CDs, on which you can’t fit shit that looks good, unless you get one of those asshole fold out covers, leaving you with a pathetic ass poster that you can’t do shit with. We get pictures of some teen angst band, posing in front of a camera, looking like Columbine victims. Where’s the magic? Where’s the mystery? Fucking CD covers suck. No, strike that… Now we have iTunes, without any fucking cover art at all, whatsoever. Nothing to touch, feel and smell and get any sort of idea about before first listen. All bands are just anonymous names on a page, or in a list, these days – just sitting there begging for you to click them based on the popularity bar on the right, or maybe because “People who bought _____ also listened to _____”. Give me a fucking break. No, I mean it... Fucking break my head, please. I don’t want to live in this spiritual wasteland of Spotify music and iTunes hell, where everything is the same, and only supplied by the big labels in acceptable formats for the brain dead masses to consume in disposable containers.
I can’t even go to a record store anymore and touch and feel, because there are no more real fucking record stores. The shit at Best Buy or FYE is the same shit that iTunes has, only alphabetized in bins. The mom and pop stores have been eaten by the corporate fucking behemoths at the expense of my fucking freedom to choose as I will from whatever the fuck I want!
Instead I am confined to surfing the internet in my underwear, like some sexual predator, from my basement, browsing the fucking web for perhaps a scrap of an interesting band at expensive import sites, that all promote all their stock items as “Progressive Death Metal from Sweden” or “Sounds like Dream Theater and Iron Maiden” – and they never fucking do. After paying $3.95 for shipping and handling, I am stuck with shit I wouldn’t have glanced at if I had seen the cover up close on a shelf in my local store instead.
Shopping for music guided by preconceived notions based on what the cover looked like used to be a motherfucking art form.
Fuck all this. I am going to go find all the Iron Maiden trivia- and song references on the back of “Somewhere in Time” again. I think I found 23 the last time, the West Ham soccer score on the scroll board being the 23rd as that is Steve’s favorite team (as only we really pathetic fucking Maiden fans know). Anyway, I am happy in my own fucking delusions.
Love,
Beppo
– Shoving kids into ovens since 2005.
By Beppo
Welcome to the home of our resident drunken ass clown. Here you will find nothing of substance, and nothing that makes sense. We pay him in dog biscuits and Jack Daniels, so you get what you pay for. What the fuck did you pay to get in, period? Right.
