Living In The Dark Age Of Music-Magazine Covers

The Guardian‘s Jon Wilde poses the “where did the good music-magazine covers go?” question today, and it’s a salient point. But any media observer could tell you that the art of the eye-catching magazine cover has seemingly been lost in general, not just when it comes to music rags; subtlety and irreverence have gone out the window across the board, only to be replaced by a stew of numbers, obvious favor-trading, celebrity-name mishmashes, and big-money baby pics.

Two recent covers of American music magazines do, however, break the moribund-cover mold; the Pete Doherty cover of the most recent Spin has a well-shot photo (snapped by French designer Hedi Slimane) and at the very least it represents a risk, having as its centerpiece an artist who’s probably familiar to most newsstand buyers through name only. And the Photoshopped-Britney cover of the most recent Blender did have a bit of a spark to it; too bad that the cheekiness exhibited within will probably be chucked by the wayside in the new, respectful-of-artists regime.

Being a Brit, Wilde’s gold standard for magazine covers is the NME, back in the days when it would actually take chances and get sorta-arty with its covers, while his least favorites were the ones proffered by the forever-out-of-touch Rolling Stone:

Little did I know it [in 1977] but the music magazine cover had entered its golden age, at least as far as NME was concerned. For the next six years, moody black and white shots by Anton Corbijn, Pennie Smith and Kevin Cummins dominated. The best of those covers are etched on my memory as though carved there by a master stonemason. Captain Beefheart in the desert. Ian McCulloch standing next to a horse. A smacked-out Iggy caressing a gnarled tree. Joe Strummer at his typewriter. Kevin Rowland in his dungarees. Paul Weller with loincloth and spear. These are the issues I’ve held onto and stored in an air-tight box at the back of the attic.

At their most striking, NME covers managed to be completely of their time and yet managed to outlast that time. No other music publication came close. Least of all Rolling Stone. Now that Rolling Stone’s entire archive of covers has been made available online, I’m reminded that its covers were the main reason why I tended to give the magazine a wide berth, even when mag-buying became my runaway addiction. With hackneyed typography and a backward-looking selection of cover artists (Boz Scaggs, Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon continuing to hold sway even as punk roared loudest), Rolling Stone’s covers rarely aspired to be timely and therefore could never hope to be considered timelessly iconic. Apart, that is, from their obituary covers that invariably struck exactly the right note.

Likewise, some of NME’s front page obituaries (Elvis, Lennon, Marvin Gaye) proved to be among its most striking and memorable. By the time of their iconic Kurt Cobain death issue, however, the golden age of NME covers was long gone. Some would argue that the baton was passed along to monthly magazines like Mojo. As eye-catching as some Mojo covers have been (New York Punk, Soul Riot, Nick Drake), the mag’s dependency on retro acts means that it’s never far from the comfort zone. When confronted with yet another homage to Beatles/Stones/Hendrix, am I alone in longing for the heady days when NME pushed unsigned bands out front, seducing the reader with exotic obscurities like Pop Group and Gang of Four? Or the days when it would take a rest from music altogether and suck us in with images of Pat Phoenix, Hitchcock and nuclear power stations?

Nuclear power stations? Something tells me that cover would only work if there were members of the Pussycat Dolls hanging out outside. Or maybe if the nuclear power plant was located in Springfield.

Music magazine covers no longer grab me [Guardian]