Visits: 116
Tag: Popular Culture
Crappy Album Covers #184 — The International Language of Bad Taste V
In the multilingual universe that is the international CAC-o-sphere, we see three guys with pasty complexions and one chick sporting skin tones of a living being.
Honestly — do we have to see the pasty complexions twice — once again in their reflections? A direct translation of the title might be uninformative, but “Look To Paris”/”I Want You” seem to come out in Google. |
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Cattus. That’s “Cat” in latin. Actually, that’s “Feline” in Latin. From Perez Prado and His Orchestra, from before the days of stereo. |
Sorry. I succumbed to the lolcat craze. Enjoy.
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Crappy Album Covers #183 — Chixdiggit!
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Crappy Album Covers #182 — Something Missing
Former trucker Vance Edwards should know better than to pose in front of a trailer without the requisite truck. And I, along with many other bloggers in the CAC-o-sphere question the use of unintelligible yellow patches on eithr red or blue clothes. The electric guitars and keyboards that could not possibly be plugged into anything has been a staple of many CAC makers, to the point where I am now convinced that it is some kind of low-brow literary technique. The chick on the drums brings a kind of feminist Karen Carperter-esque overtone to the cover, while keeping the group locked into its focus as CAC makers of the first order.Then, like hours on the clock, there are these graphics arranged in a pattern similar to the bottom graphic in this post. Except that they are trucks, not sex positions. While Truckin’ came out in 1973, it is hard to know which idea came first.
Not much else is known about Vance or his band. |
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Another circular graphic of another band, this time with an actual clock watermarked on to the photo. We have two bouffont-encrusted ladies playing electric guitar — one of them showing off a subconscious desire to play like Ace Frehley (or pick your heavy metal fave) by sporting a dual-necked guitar. Both ckicks are in their cut-below-the-knee Century 21 Real Estate suits and red turtlenecks, matching Ricky Ricardo’s (?) dinner jacket.Not much else is known about the Calvary-Aires; though much speculation and prognostication pervades the CAC blogosphere, which I will not repeat here. The Calvary Aires had warned me that it is against the Scriptures to prognosticate. Not sure they knew what the word meant. |
Visits: 112
Crappy Album Covers #181 — Plainness, overdone
Currently selling on E-Bay for about 15 bucks, Bobbi Jean White’s album “Higher Ground!” shows Ms White sporting the bouffont she was well-known for.White had been singing gospel since she was a child in Georgia. She had recorded dozens of albums either solo or with other groups, then became a radio announcer beginning for a Gospel radio station in the 1970s. This career extended into the early 90s.She had lost her hearing 12 years ago, and got it back this year through surgery, hearing again at age 79. | |
P. J. Orion and the Magnate$’ self-titled LP is diaplayed here, with its litany of cliches, including (1) with the band posing with electrical instruments that could not possibly be plugged into anything; (2) wearing shades; (3) railroad motif; (4) prairie background with requisite blue sky.This was rumored to have been released in the 1960s, while the guys in the photo were attending prep school. |
Visits: 132
Crappy Album Covers #180 — The standards and the classics
Elva Miller (1907-1997) made her claim to fame with purposefully bad Ethel Merman imitations where she sung songs from the Great American Songbook out of tune, along with many other kinds of well-known songs.When Mrs. Miller “Does her Thing”, I think the message here is that it is time to run and hide. You never know what’s in those brownies. | |
“Hey! Youse guys want to hear some o’ dat long-hair classical music or what? Well, don’t let some schmuck wearing a tux tell you what classical music is; let me tell you. Now, uh, I think my music teacher told me dat once you hear The Nutcracker, all of the classical music sounds like that. Trouble is, though, my music teacher ran off with my money before I had all my lessons. Dat’s why I dress like a bum. My brudder here got through his lessons, but got killed in an accident with a cabbage truck. We cryogenically froze him in dis position, and so once in a while I take the fiddle from his hand, and fool around with it a bit. Frig it, he’s dead anyway — and I put it back after a while.”
No information exists about Markos and Nadas Gyorgy that I am aware of. |
Here is Miss Elva Miller, singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking”. Rather than sounding like Merman, I think that in this song at least, she sounds more like Miss Piggy on the Muppet Show. This is off of her “Greatest Hits” LP:
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Crappy Album Covers #179 — Strange Cowboys
No idea who this cowboy wannabe is, but Gercei Camargo’s idea of being a cowboy — and a singing one at that — is to wear something strange over his nether region (looks like a kilt with a cushion) and frilly pants over his cowboy boots. | |
Sharon McNight’s “Another Side Of” was likely released after 1989. Many blogs I have seen referred to the shirtless cowboy who looks like he is about to spew chunks; and the two dogs next to Sharon who blend into the carpet too well. I can add that her black dress makes her white as a ghost. And doesn’t the set seem a little tilted?
Sharon is (or has been) a Tony award-winning actress on Broadway, and is still performing between New York and her native San Francisco. |
Visits: 112
Crappy Album Covers #112 — “By his stripes we were healed”
The title of ths blog, “By his stripes we were healed”, is the last line of verse 53:5 in the book of Isaiah.
This tells me that Stryper has come to save us from, uhh …, what? Whtever it is, they had to bring out the guns and armoured vehicles for it. Something tells me that the anwer to our interpersonal conflicts should not involve the use of military vehicles. |
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Clever title, Isabel. I actually like it very much. It says that I choose God for something I like, not for something other people are coercing me to like. You have to respect that.
No information exists on Isabel Baker that I could find, except that this blogger found an MP3 of her gospel singing. This goes beyond categorizations of “Christian Rock.” She sounds more like a cross between Lydia Lunch and Diamanda Galas. While these latter two don’t qualify as Christian Rock, the resemblance between kinds of music was uncanny. I might even add Romeo Void. By the end of that song sample, one would be led to think that she loves God just a bit more than is, uh, Christian. Where have we heard that one before? |
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Crappy Album Covers #111 — People are Beautiful, man
As an extra added bonus, and to conclude this post just the right way, here is REM, featuring Kate Pierson of the B-52s with the 1991 hit “Shiny, Happy People”:
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Crappy Album Covers #110 — Minimalist design
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Crappy Album Covers #108 — Sucking back in the day
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Crappy Album Covers #106 — Crappy Canadian Covers
… And both of them are from that Canadian group from Montreal called April Wine. This group was really big in Canada in the 70s and 80s, and they had some of my favourite songs that I grew up with. Trouble was, while their music was really good, their record covers consistently sucked greasy cheese balls. They were flat, cliche covers that made no impression whatsoever on the buyer. Here are two of, in my opinion, the worst album covers that April Wine had offered in this vein.
This is their 1973 album “Electric Jewels”, which is cliche in every detail and screams to the buyer nothing more than “this is an album with music in it”. It totally belies what is inside the covers of this album. Well, there is “Electric” in the title, so you might be expected to play this one a little louder.
While just about every track on this record is a strong track, capable of getting you hooked, none of its three singles made the top-10 (Lady Run, Lady Hide (peaked @ 19, lasted 5 weeks); Weeping Widow (peaked @ 40, lasted 2 weeks); and Electric Jewels (never made the top 40)). Both records in today’s posting could easily have been designed by K-Tel. |
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The cover for “Live at the El Mocambo” embellishes the design on the backdrop of one of the stages of the landmark night club. The two palm trees were part of El Mocambo’s trademark. But this idea only works as an album cover backdrop if you live in Toronto. If you are from outside Toronto, or have never been in the night club, you are left scratching your head, wondering if they’ve adopted a Jimmy Buffett sound.
The ElMo, as it is known to us locals, is located on 404 Spadina, in the middle of what they call the Computer Ghetto in Downtown Toronto. Got changed to a dance studio a few years back, then re-opened again. The Ramones played there. So did Lou Reed, Blondie, The Police, Black Flag, Jonhhy Winter, Charles Mingus, Rush, Elvis Costello, U2, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and even Marilyn Monroe. She played there in 1958. When April Wine recorded live for this album in 1977, they were opening for The Rolling Stones. Just like a Canadian band to take all that tradition, and all those bragging rights, and make an album cover that is as lame as you can possibly make it. Believe it or not, their concerts were not lame, explaining why they recorded 7 live albums in their tenure. This album reputedly has a killer live version of Oowatanite. But who would know? By 1979, I remember noticing piles of these albums in the delete bin. |
In total April Wine had released 35 singles by 1993, and 21 of them charted in the Top 40. 7 of them were hits in the U. S., with three of them peaking on Billboard in the Top 40: Could Have Been A Lady (1972), Roller (1979), and Just Between You and Me (1981). At least 3 of their albums went either platinum or double platinum.
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Crappy Album Covers #105 — Selling fantasy
The Jay Gordon Concert Orchestra offers the album “Strictly for Lovers” off of the TOPS label, a CAC factory which was located at one time somewhere in the southwestern U. S. which has supplied my blog with a healthy number of CACs thus far.
There’s an attractive woman, whispering something into her boyfriend’s ear. Something like “I haff zee microfilm.” Anyone who is not a lover should stay away from this record. Turn it off! Don’t buy it! Put it back in the remainder bin! |
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TOPS made money actually selling radiation instruments, if readers of my blog will remember. This could make them part of the Military Industrial Complex. And while we are on the topic of war, here are the natives of Auburn, New York with their band Manowar, with their 1983 album (not found on TOPS, sorry), called “Into Glory Hole Ride”.
This cover has been fodder for many a CAC blog, mostly because of the overwhelmingly subconscious homosexual slant involving handlebar moustaches and loincloths. OK… maybe a little more than subconscious. I suppose they could have called their album “Hairway to Steven”, but the Butthole Surfers already have that album title. Manowar is notable for owning their own label and distribution system. They are a true “Indie” band. Their label is called Magic Circle Records. Wikipedia says that Manowar broke the longstanding record in 1994 for the world’s loudest rock band. Beating The Who by 3.5 decibels, their Hanover concert was measured at 129.5 decibels. Over the years, The Swans, Motorhead, AC/DC, Deep Purple, My Bloody Valentine, and The Rolling Stones have all surpassed this, breaking the 130 decibel mark. Manowar beat them all in 2008 with a Magic Circle Fest concert that measured 139 dB. Guiness Book has stopped making records of “loudest concerts” due to the prospect of encouraging hearing damage. |
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Crappy Album Covers #104 — Crappy Blockbusters
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Crappy Album Covers #102 — Ideas that wouldn't work these days
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Crappy Album Covers #97 — Religious Ideas that Backfire
I am glad that Greg Kendrick is sharing his saga of sexual abuse with us. Why keep it bottled up inside? Yes, Greg, we understand. The police are on their way to apprehend the guy who touched you. Cellmates will probably kill him when he goes to jail.
OK, so this is not the only album with this title. Four middle-aged guys called The Minister’s Quartet had this title, and it too has wound up in every “worst album cover” blog from here to heck, including mine. |
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This is the one and only album for the Christian Metal/Glam Metal group, Stryken. First Strike, released in 1986, shows on its cover what you expect to hear inside. Here you see the four natives of Austin, Texas, all of whom don’t look so threatening as loopy, putting out an album, that takes the Christian metal genre to its ultimate futility.
The next year they were said to have been arrested for distrupting a Motley Crue show when they appeared in front of their stage wearing full armour and carrying a large cross. Few people remember Stryken anymore. If you talk to God you are likely praying; but when God talks to Stryken, it is more likely because they hadn’t taken their meds. |
Visits: 160
Crappy Album Covers #95 — Le Concours de Fromage
If these albums were entered into a cheesiness contest, they would be strong contenders.
This 1989 album cover appears to have been designed by an 11 year-old who discovered the shape tools in MS-Paintbrush and began to overuse them. It was released by Sony in 1990 and re-released by smaller labels in 1998, 1999 and 2000. This is their 7th compilation LP out of several. Having only recorded only 8 albums, their latest being in 2006, they have had more albums of compilations than of original material.
What adds a tinge of sadness to their musical history, is that one of the members of their original lineup, Jessee Whittens, was murdered, according to allmusic.com, but another blogger says that Whittens lost his life in an accident. |
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The Glitter Band, a band put together by ’70s rock star Gary Glitter, was supposed to be formed from a core of two drummers and two saxophonists.
Their biggest hit was a song called Makes You Blind, first released in 1976, and peaked at #91 for a week in that year. The record seems to say: “Hey! We’re lame and proud of it!” |
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Crappy Album Covers #94 — Not My Day Job
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Crappy Album Covers #92 — Sucky even for metal
I have said several times on my blog that I had a policy of not listing metal covers due to the fact that ugliness is often a sales point with this music genre. I often delve into metal CAC blogs to see if I can find anything I could write about (in case there might be some howlers out there), and after 91 CAC entries, I have come up empty-handed. Now in CAC #92, I have found two CACs, both from the same group, Pantera. These are Pantera’s first two albums ever, “Projects in the Jungle”, followed by “Metal Magic.” This band from Arlington, Texas is still going with its own website, Dimebag is still there with his bro’ Vinnie, as they have been for the past 28 years.
Now, if there was some kind of “first law of metal album cover design”, it should be to never let yourself do the cover, and to never let someone’s kid do the cover. |
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This next bit of adolescent artwork would have pleased his mother, but the next step should have been to send him to art school, not make metal album covers.
Here, we have Pantera, without pants. The albums give the impression of a low-rent band that would be considered “not bad for local”. Pantera would have had to bave been together for 9 more years before they saw their first major commercial breakthrough, Cowboys From Hell, which established them as pioneers in the post-punk “Groove Metal” genre. |
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Crappy Albums Covers (Sidebar) — Make your own crappy album cover
This is April Fool’s Day, so I thought that it would be a good time to post albums that don’t exist. In fact, I will be doing nothing but fake albums for the month of April.If you have been an avid reader of my postings, you would have noticed that the band names depicted here were the same ones I made up in this post.Looks like any of hundreds of indie band album covers.
If you want to know how to put these things together, scroll down. And yes, these were photoshopped. |
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If you want to boost album sales, there’s nothing like watermarking a “Parental Advisory/Explicit Lyrics” logo on the cover so that people will ignore your artistic message and simply buy your album to listen for all the F— words. And if there aren’t any, they can’t really sue a rating system for false advertising, can they?
You can getchy’er parental advisory sticker by Googling it (there are plenty out there), then layer it in Photoshop (shrink it first if necessary), setting the opacity to under 50% so that it simply shows up as a watermark. When you’re done with inserting the title and band name, cropping the photo and so on, you then flatten the image and save it as a jpeg. |
Here are the instructions for making up your own artificial crappy album cover, courtesy of emptees.com, together with my own commentary:
A Do-It-Yourself Indie Band Album Cover:
- Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More”, or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. Or alternatively, pick a band name using the band name generator and word of your liking at bandnamemaker.com (my preferred method). Warning: to my knowledge neither method will generate a band name such as “Jesus of Kapuskasing”. That name was pure invention. Jesus is, well, Jesus; and Kapuskasing (pronounced cap-us-KAY-sing) is a small town in northern Ontario. I used it because “Jesus of Montreal” was already taken (it is the title of an independent film). Wikipedia has that title.
- Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. In both cases above, I used the Wikipedia titles from rule #1 to title the album.
- Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. I threw less caution to the wind and looked a little harder.
- Use photoshop or similar to put it all together. Make sure it’s a square. 500 x 500 pixels is ideal. I require a square image too, but I do not have “ideal” limits. Whatever the size, it ends up on my blog as 300 x 300.
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