iTunes: The Decline and Fall of Great Metal Artwork?

Metal is both style and substance, bullets and bravado. Beneath its swagger lurks a legitimate demand for respect and independence.  Yet appearance and reality aren't always at odds, and one of metal's triumphs as a genre is its ability to bring facade and foundation together into one coherent expression.

1984 was a good year
for metal artwork

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that from metal's earliest days the blank canvass that is an album cover became an important piece of a band's creative output.  Without it, what Edgar Allen Poe in his Philosophy of Composition called the "poetic effect" is lost.  Mercyful Fate's 1984 Don't Break The Oath, for example, seemed a dangerous album to many fans in part because the cover art matched the pure evil-ness of King Diamond's screeching vocals. 

Great albums had great artwork. And every old-school metalhead has had the experience of buying an album solely on that basis.  While walking through a record store  (remember those?) an album cover catches your eye.  You give it a quick once over and conclude, "this album is going to make me destroy my living room!"  Some covers just leap out and crush your skull, spark your curiosity, or anger the right authority.

Agent Steel's classic (1986) EP

Let's have some examples, shall we?

L.A. speed metal found no better showcase album cover than Agent Steel's 1986 classic EP, Mad Locust Rising.  For a band whose lead singer, John Cyriis, used apocalyptic conspiracy-filled lyrical themes, the image of a mechanised swarm of locusts appearing from a wormhole above earth became the perfect visual vehicle.  When you see it, you pretty much know your neck will hurt the following day.

Ed Repka's (1986) eye-catching artwork

So important was having a solid album cover during the early days of thrash that Megadeth's Dave Mustaine identified Combat Records' mishandling of the cover for his debut album, Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good, as a major factor in his decision to leave Combat for Capitol Records.  It came as no surprise that Dave hit an album cover home run on Megadeth's 1986 follow-up, Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?  In 2002, Mustaine re-issued their now-classic debut but with a new cover that carefully matched the vision he had crafted for it over 17 years earlier.  This decision came as no surprise to most metalheads who saw the reissue.  Time, it seems, heals only superficial wounds.

Maybe Mustaine should have
helped with the cover too?

Ok, there were a few duds

The correlation between great albums and great metal did not always hold up.  Sometimes forgettable albums had interesting covers.  More often, due to budget constraints, great metal lay hidden behind mediocre or lack luster album covers.  Metallica's 1983 debut Kill 'Em All is a case in point.  Besides the cool logo-design, nobody would have accused that old-school thrash masterpiece of being served on mama's best china.



And upon merely hearing it, who would have guessed Overkill's absolutely amazing 1985 Feel The Fire would have been so improperly dressed?  Still, these are the exceptions, not the rule.  From its roots in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), from Iron Maiden's classic covers to Motorhead's steel-rolling veneer, biting album covers defined the genre.

Decreasing size, decreasing interest?

Venom: no jacket required?

While thrash metal was founded on cassette tape-trading, an album deal on vinyl was the gold-standard of the day.  Vinyl album covers provided ample room for artistic expression.  Over time though, the album was replaced by the cassette tape, and the size of the front covers decreased dramatically.  But any decrease in the area of metal's artistic canvass was counterbalanced by the benefit of a foldout "jacket" allowing multiple images and areas for text.  Still, something had been lost.  When CDs entered mainstream production, it seemed the best of both worlds.  CDs brought back enough size to matter and allowed additional foldouts, imagery, etc.  It seemed the golden age of album covers had dodged a major bullet.

Then came the .mp3 format and iTunes. The arrival of .mp3s ushered in a new era for metal artwork. It's an odd era though; metalheads brought up in an earlier time retain their traditional concern for album covers even as the graphic user interfaces (GUIs) of today - most notably Apple's iTunes - have rendered such meticulous concern obsolete.  The fact is the images are now just too damn small.  The Van Goghian canvass has become a Goldbergian microdot.

See Anthrax's superb cover art for their (2011)
Worship Music?  No?  That's ok, neither can I.

Take my iTunes account as an example.  When I bought Anthrax's outstanding 2011 comeback offering Worship Music, I bought it as a CD.  Not only is the cover cool, but so is the back, the inside, and hell even the CD itself - which displays the same Anthrax-o-gram shown on the front. 

But in iTunes, even when I display it on my laptop computer screen I can barely see it.  It doesn't add to the character of the musical experience at all.  Most worryingly, without a good look at the cover art, the zombie-apocalypse themed fourth track "Fight 'Em 'Till You Can't" fails to resonate against the swarming zombie ghouls on the cover.  This correlation is completely lost in iTunes for the simple reason that I can't see the zombies.  Call me old-fashioned, but I don't want to lose that added dimension.

An excellent cover to an excellent album

Perhaps we can adapt, but I fear that over time technology drives tradition and this tradition will die out.  There's nothing sacrosanct about this aspect of metal's past, but unlike the cassette or CD revolutions, iTunes and other GUIs provide an ever-diminishing space for artistic excellence. 

The canvass has been diminished alongside royalties from record sales. 



- J.H.