Some of the most iconic pop culture images of our times come from album art. But for many Blind and Low Vision music fans, album covers are little more than cardboard sleeves to protect precious vinyl. Today, Christine and JJ describe art from Billboard’s Top 50 Album Covers of All Time, and throw in some listener requests for good measure.
For Billboard’s complete list, visit: https://www.billboard.com/photos/6715351/best-album-covers-of-all-time/
Some of the most iconic pop culture images of our times come from album art. But for many Blind and Low Vision music fans, album covers are little more than cardboard sleeves to protect precious vinyl. Today, Christine and JJ describe art from Billboard’s Top 50 Album Covers of All Time, and throw in some listener requests for good measure.
For Billboard’s complete list, visit: https://www.billboard.com/photos/6715351/best-album-covers-of-all-time/
Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ Hunt.
Christine Malec:Hi, I'm Christine Malec.
JJ Hunt:And I'm JJ Hunt. This is talk description to me with the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description rich conversations.
Christine Malec:For this week's episode came from an incident that happened to me a few weeks ago, I was out with friends, and there were four of us. And there was one sided person and three blind people. So we were doing the classic conga line train deal, crossing the road, with hands on each other's shoulders, making a little line and my friend behind me who had been sighted, at one point said, I feel like a Beatle. And I was completely flummoxed, I didn't know what he was talking about. So it eventually came up that the cover of Abbey Road was was the album was a little representative of the configuration that we were in. And so he had to sort of outline that for me. And it made me think of all of the classic and new album cover art that I don't know about. And it definitely this kind of thing that does come up in cultural references. And so we thought we'd do an episode and talk about that and ask for listener feedback, which we did also get some as well. So we'll be describing some listener requests as well. But, JJ, let's start with Abbey Road.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, I mean, the Beatle's Abbey Road is a I mean, you really you'd be hard pressed to find a more recognizable band image than the cover of this album. I'd certainly there's no album cover that has been parodied or satirized as much as this one it is, it is absolutely iconic. So Abbey Road was released in 1969. The cover is a single photograph. So it really it looks like a color snapshot. It's a little bit grainy. It's got it's got an impromptu feel to it. The quality of the image kind of has a casual look to it. It's not perfectly sharp and clear. We are looking down a tree lined street in London, the paved road recedes into the distance, and it's it's lined with cars, including a white Volkswagen Beetle, and a black London taxi cab. And across the bottom of the image are a series of white lines that look like giant piano keys. These are the white lines that indicate a crosswalk at an intersection. And the four Beatles are walking across the street from our left to our right. And they're all mid stride. So their legs are spread. They're in a straight line. They're kind of walking in unison, but they are dressed as individuals and not wearing a band uniform or anything like that. So it's john in the front. He's at our right and he's got real this is 1969 so we've got really long brown hair bushy beard, and he's wearing a white suit and white shoes. Behind him is Ringo. And Ringo has hair to his shoulders. A trimmed get more sparse beard. And Ringo is wearing a black suit with a but the jacket is quite long. It's a longer jacket on the black suit. Paul is next in line. He's got this mop ish hair. He's clean shaven wearing a blue suit, and he's barefoot, and he's got a cigarette between his fingers. And the last in line at our left. That's George and he's got long black hair, us really scruffy beard. He's wearing white shoes and blue denim shirt, blue denim bell bottoms. That's what we here in the Great White North call a Canadian tuxedo. And of course there're spoofs and meems of this image from everyone like the Simpsons, the original Star Trek crew has been put in this position walking across the street, all of the doctor who's I've seen Snoopy and the peanuts gang The Muppets from Sesame Street Star Wars characters. I've even seen a meme that has all of the same Beatles but they're on segways riding across the street. You can find this recreated in art on album covers on Instagram travel photos of visitors to Abbey Road, and you can even watch the Abbey Road live webcam and see who is crossing this famous intersection live 24 hours a day the Abbey Road live webcam.
Christine Malec:Now back when I was young, an album was a big flat square thing you know cardboard with vinyl inside so it was pretty standard. And so when I think album art that's kind of what I'm picturing, but You know, we've gone through CDs and digital platforms. And so what's been the evolution of album art from back in the day until today?
JJ Hunt:It is different, it's trickier to put your to get your head around it because it You're right, it just used to be a single image. And the album cover would be the album cover. That's it, it might change a little bit if if the album is re released, or if it gets pressed in different places. But the album art was the album art. Now, you've got album art for all kinds of things. You've got the album art for a record, or a CD or some kind of, you know, hard item that you purchase. But most of the time, the album art is actually for an icon that is used in the iTunes Store or something like that. And it's used in social media. So now you have different kinds of art. There you'll have one central image, but it'll be tweaked depending on how, how it's being used. So a good example of this is actually comes from a request, Macey on Twitter asked us to describe Golden Hour by Kygo. Kygo is a tropical house DJ, and Golden Hour was released in 2020. And there are lots of different versions of the art for this one album. And I've seen different configurations, it's all got the same elements, but the configurations of elements are different. So the main element is, is cargos face in profile. He's a young white man, he's got a sloping forehead, a long, sharp nose, full lips, a pronounced Adam's apple. And in the image, he's always facing our right. And he's rendering of the in a very faint kind of almost translucent black and white photo, and blended into his silhouette, are tall, thin palm trees that are set against a pinky orange sunset. And in some versions of the album art, it seems that the the portrait enters on our left edge of the image. So it's just popping in from the left, so his face kind of enters from the left side and only occupies maybe a quarter of the piece in the title golden hour is printed in very small letters right in the center of the album. But in other renderings I've seen the portrait is is full in front and center. So again, he's still facing the right, but you don't just see his face, you see the entire head, you see the back of his head, and the sunset that's inside his silhouette is much brighter. And in fact, it's much more colorful, there's more color in that rendering, there's a blue cloudy sky that's above the pink and orange sunset. So it's interesting depending on how it's used. If this is on a physical album, I'm guessing you just get the half portrait over to the left. If this is an icon format on iTunes, maybe that's a moment when they're going to use the full face that's centered in the square. So different different uses, means they're going to change the art accordingly.
Christine Malec:And we've had other we had several listener requests, we put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and we got several people asking for album covers that they wanted to hear described. So JJ, where are we going to start with that?
JJ Hunt:So we got a request from Elaine on Twitter to to describe steely Dan's the Royal Scam. Royal Scam was steely Dan's fifth studio album released in 1976. And it This one's a bit of an it's an odd one, the album It's kind of odd, it's kind of in a dingy gray palette. And across the bottom third of the album cover is a photo of a man in a trench coat lying on a bench. So this looks like like a bench inside of a train station or something like that. Not a park bench. But an indoor bench. It looks like someone trying to sleep in a train station and above that so the rest of the cover is this kind of airbrushed looking painting of full four tall towers like skyscrapers that are rising up into a dark cloudy sky. And at the top of each tower is the head of a beast. So one is a lizard. The other ones are less clear there are jaws and eyes and open mouths maybe once but serpent die It's hard to tell. And then in the upper left in the thick steel gray lettering with a bold black drop shadow it just reads Steely Dan, and below that the Royal scam and one of the interesting things about this album art apparently was originally designed for another album, and the artists didn't like it or the record company didn't like it. So they said no. And then it got resold and and became the cover art for the Royal Scam by Steely Dan.
Christine Malec:Another listener request we had was from Debbie on Twitter, and she was asking about the album some girls by Rolling Stones. So JJ, what's the what's the deal with this one?
JJ Hunt:This is an interesting one because they were something like 15 different versions of this album cover made as the 1978 album, and the basically so the cover is designed to look like an ad for a women's wig manufacturer, that kind of ad that you would find in the back of a pulp magazine or a comic book or something. So the cover itself is divided into four[horizontal] rows, and the rows are inside these rows are a series of women's heads with different haircuts from the 50's 60's and 70s you know, around that era. Below each head is text that you know sometimes gives the name of the wig in a font style that matches the wigs style. But sometimes instead, there are the names of the songs that are on the album in the same matching wigs like font style. So for example, there's a picture of a woman in a quaffed wig that has sculpted wings on the side and swooping bangs across the forehead, and in italicize, 1970s bubble font underneath it, it says beast of burden $7.99. And so sometimes these images of the wig models are complete, but in some cases, the faces are cut out. And the cutout faces actually lined up perfectly with images of band members and I think others who are on the inside flap. So these are black and white photos with bright red lips. This is on the art that's on the inside cover. So what happens is when you open up the album, the cutouts, they you know they shot they open up to the faces that are behind them, right so you can see all the all the faces when it's open when you close it the cutouts inside of the faces and these wigs line up with the faces. So what you end up with is like this weird, cheap pulp magazine wig catalog featuring the faces of young Mick Jagger and Ron Wood, and the variations but the reason they're 15 is because they change the colors and the cutouts all over the place. So some versions were black and white. But in some each row is a different color like bright green, canary yellow, baby blue, and pink. All mixed up in different configurations, different patterns. So it's a really weird interesting kind of 3D tactile, you know, cut out album covers really cool.
Christine Malec:That's crazy.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, the Rolling Stones did a few album covers like that, where they played with, you know, tactile elements. Probably the most well known or the most notorious is the 1971 album sticky fingers. This was a fantastic I mean, it's a great album. But the the original pressings the design by Andy Warhol featured a working zipper on a man's fly. So the front cover is a grainy black and white close up photo of a man and tight jeans. And just above the belt to like to mid thigh. That's really what we're talking about here. The the model's hip is cocked to one side. So there's some attitude in the stance, the belt that the model is wearing is old, it's why it's leather, two rows of holes, one above the other. And then there's a clear bulge on our left side of the fly, giving the clear impression that this is a very well endowed man who dresses to his right.
Christine Malec:Ha ha ha!
JJ Hunt:And so you've got the original -
Christine Malec:Ha ha ha! I'm sorry, I'm stuck. I've never heard it put that way. Sorry.
JJ Hunt:Yes, every good tailor will ask you "Do you dress to the right? Do you dress to the left?" Yes.
Christine Malec:Gasp! Is that a thing?!
JJ Hunt:That's a thing. That's a real thing. Yeah. Ha ha.
Christine Malec:Wow! Okay, we could just stop right now, because that was enough knowledge to carry me through.
JJ Hunt:Ha ha ha ha!
Christine Malec:Sorry, please, please carry on.
JJ Hunt:Haaaaah! So what they did with the original pressing is they had a zipper that you could like actually Undo. It's still it's just a tactile zipper on a printed image. So you can't actually open up the pants or anything like that. You could just, you know, undo the zipper. But what they found, of course, it was very expensive to print this. But it was also damaging to the record. And that is kind of what people were buying this for. So they had to switch to just a purely printed one, but it's a great one. And then on the back of course, it's just the is the models bum. So it's like it's the same image from from reverse. So instead of getting the tight pants from the front, you get the tight pants from the back. It's a good one.
Christine Malec:Wow, that is really... and I love their choice to focus on a male model. That's very refreshing.
JJ Hunt:Absolutely. They say it's not Mick Jagger, but I don't know.
Christine Malec:Heh heh heh. Who's ready to compare and
JJ Hunt:Ha ha ha!
Christine Malec:So we know for sure. Ha ha ha! Well, that's not contrast? completely irrelevant to another request that we got from Oliver on Twitter about Spinal Tap. Now, Oliver, we're not sure if you're having us on and you already know the answer to this or if like me, you also were a bit confused. So the request was for the album Smell the Glove by Spinal Tap. So I'm going to let Jay Jay set this up because it's not a simple answer to this question.
JJ Hunt:No. So you got to know the movie Spinal Tap a little bit for this one. So within the mockumentary Spinal Tap, this is a fake documentary, about a fake metal band. And, and they are they're dopes, they're wonderful dopes, and they've got an album coming out that is called smell the glove. And I don't think they actually ever show the original album art, but they discuss it. And when they're discussing it, they talk about how offensive it is because there are complaints because it's a woman in a dog collar and someone's shoving gloves like rubber gloves interface or something. And it's so offensive that the album label decides they have to they have to come up with what they call a compromised cover. And so they present the band The manager presents the band with the compromise cover. And what what he hands the band members are these albums that are completely black, the entire thing has been censored. So front and back, the album is 100% black. It's just this black cardboard square covered with shrink wrap, clear plastic. And so as the band members are holding a first they're really confused, they don't understand but then they have to justify it to themselves. So here's where the confusion comes in. Because if you're not watching the movie described, what you hear them say is their justifications like"Oh, it looks like death." "Oh, this is clearly death." "So this is the void. This is the void that we..."
Christine Malec:Huck huck huck.
JJ Hunt:So they kind of go for these ridiculous explanations but from a purely audio description standpoint, what I
can say is:it's black. Nothing else to it. Completely black.
Christine Malec:So when JJ first saw the request, he was scratching his head. He's like,"Is he having us on? It's just all black?" But I thought back to the movie many years ago when I watched I don't remember being clear about that. And we actually listened to the clip and I went "No, it's not clear to me that there's nothing on that album cover." So Oliver, Thank you. You gave us a laugh and you cleared up a decade's old mystery for me.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, was a good one. Thanks, Oliver.
Christine Malec:Now JJ you also went to the Billboard charts to look at some of the Top Albums. What did you find there That was fun to talk about?
JJ Hunt:Billboard put out this all time greatest covers list of all time it was updated in 2020. So I use that as like, you know, trying to figure out what albums to describe. Right. Wow. So yeah, let's let's go through a few few favorites. A few interesting ones. Starting with number 48. Lady Gaga has the Fame Monster from 2009. So this album features a straight on portrait of Lady Gaga in a white wig and a slick shiny black maybe vinyl jacket. The week she's wearing his his white It looks like a bit of an arrowhead with a rounded tip. So curving over the top of her head flaring out symmetrically over both shoulders as wide as her shoulders, and then it's cut straight across her bangs in like leaving a tight little window for her face. But she's also pulling up the color of this black vinyl jacket that's got really wide straight shoulders. And so she's pulling up the collar she's got this little window where her bangs are. And so what you see of her face is her is her pale white skin, her long, straight nose and her eyes that are ringed with dark makeup and she's looking straight at us. And then centered across the bottom in all white all caps. It reads Lady Gaga and then below that the theme monster and the tea in monster looks like a crucifix. So that's Lady Gaga number 48. Number 46 is one of my all time favorites, a great album. Funkadelic's Maggot Brain from 1971. It's a really good album one of my very favorite songs can you get to that was what I was listening to before we started recording because it's just such a great song. And since I've done the description, I can't stop listening to that song on repeat. And the image on the front of the album is the head of a black woman with a big Afro and she's buried a right up to her neck in in dirt. And so that's the entire image it's a close up of her you all you see is the dirt and her head and she's screaming her mouth is open or eyes are squeezed shut. And and that's the entire picture above her head in fairly small print in these jumbled orange letters it says funkadelic and then below it says maggot brain and the same orange kind of jumbled letters. And the back cover is more or less the same except that the woman's head has been replaced with a white skull that's facing us directly. So that's Funkadelic's Maggot Brain. Let's jump ahead to number 32. Really cool, very striking, very strong and really bold album cover from Lizzo. This is the 2019 album Cuz I love you. And this is an interesting album because it features no print, there's no artists name, there's no title. The album art is just a studio photo. And it's the artist, Lizzo. She's a big plus size black woman. And in this photo, she's sitting in a black space on the floor, and she's completely naked, looking directly at us. So she's sitting on the floor with both legs in front of her her feet at our lower left and her backside at our lower right so we're seeing her from the side but she's turned red is turned to face us, and she's leaning forward just a little bit with her hands resting on her ankles. This positioning means that we don't see her breasts we don't see her backside so there's no actual censoring required. So what we get to see is her whole body we are seeing we are showing the side of her very ample leg, her large soft arms and lots of her beautiful smooth dark skin and her chins raised like I said she's turned to face us but she's not smiling. Now I would have to say that our expression is maybe defiant. Maybe challenging, but there's also a softness to it and she's got long straight black hair that's draped down her back and truly completely naked as far as we can tell the only thing we she we see that she's wearing is a little bit of eye makeup. Some pink polish on her long fingernails and white polish on her toenails. Number 31 on the Billboard list is the Sex Pistols Nevermind the bollocks, here's the Sex Pistols from 1977. So this is totally different. Where's as the last one was all image, this one is all text. This is a classic punk album cover. No adornments, no band, just a real we aren't playing the game middle finger to the industry. bright yellow background so bright that it's almost difficult to look at for too long. And then in bold black letters right across the top in like these kind of you know, they're a little bit offset. It looks like someone you know ran off a band poster on some kind of old mimeograph machine or something it says, nevermind the Bullock's, which was a word that was very much censored 1977 by the way. Nevermind the Bullock's, Here's the, and then this banner, this pink strip across the bottom of the image from the lower left to the middle right is the band named Sex Pistols. And the name is written in mismatched letters. That's how the Sex Pistols usually write their name, kind of like they're cut out of a newspaper for a ransom note. But here it looks like they're cut out of the pink strip. So you see the yellow underneath you see the yellow coming through. And it's that's it. It's really simple. I mean, it looks like the label of a no name product more than it does an album cover. But apparently the that are this style fed into the ad campaign with some of their ads
reading:The album will last the sleeve may not. So that was how the Sex Pistols handled this like you know, creating art to represent the band. Okay, let's zip to number 25 David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, this is 1973. Now this wasn't the album that actually introduced us to David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust alter ego, but the album art features the iconic image of that character that everyone knows right so here we've got a portrait photo of David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust. He's bare chested facing us. He's a thin white man with sloping shoulders, a fairly long neck and his his face is a bit red. But he's got this bright red mullet a very distinctive red mullet hair brushed up and back on top cut short on the sides and flared out just a bit to either side of the back of his neck and his eyes are closed, his lips are slightly parted. And there's a red lightning bolt with a steel blue drop shadow. That's why it is that his hairline in the center of his forehead, and then zigzags down over one eye, back over the bridge of the nose, and then back down again and comes to a point at his jaw line. So this is on his right, our left if we're looking at the image, there's a bright light light that's shining on his chest. And there's a kind of false looking bit of water that's pooling on his collarbone that's about to drip down onto his chest. And that's the whole image as he it says David Bowie in them in the upper right. And the title of the album, Aladdin Sane at the right across the bottom. But what's interesting about this is this face David Bowie's face that red mole at the lightning bolt are so iconic, it's on T shirts and posters and, you know, it's all over the place, but often it's represented without David Bowie's actual face. It's just the shape of the hair and the lightning bolt, maybe a little pink for the eyeshadow that he's wearing. Even just that is so clear as a character that that's what gets represented a lot of the time. It's not David Bowie's face. it's it's it's the it's the hair. It's the lightning bolt. That's the Ziggy Stardust alter ego that so many people know. Number 19 is Judas Priest British Steel. This is a 1980 heavy metal album now priest had been around English heavy metal band been around since the 60s, but most of their mainstream success came in the 1980s. And the reason I wanted to talk about this album covers because, you know, so many metal bands tried to be hardcore with extreme images. But this album art was really effective at kind of using a viewer's imagination against them. So it's not that the image is really gory, but it's super effective at kind of giving us chills. The album art is just one photograph, it's set against the back background, and there's a hand palm facing toward us kind of reaching toward us. And the hand shape is very much like if you if you imagine fingers gripping the edges of a business card and someone showing it to you, so they're showing you the business card with the [fingers] around the outside edge.
Christine Malec:Um hmm.
JJ Hunt:That's what this looks like. But what the hand is gripping is not a business card, it's a razor blade from an old fashioned safety razor. So the fingers are all pressed against the extremely sharp edges of the blade. But the thing is, there are no cuts we can't see any cuts we can't see any blood there's some shadow that kind of covers the places where the fingers are touching the edges of the blade and then printed across the shiny steel surface of the razor is the band name Judas Priest in the stylized modern Gothic font often used for metal bands, and then the name of the album British steel in small all caps. But this image captures the precise moment before the tips of the fingers are inevitably sliced open by the razor sharp edges. And so from a visual standpoint, this immediately
Christine Malec:Ooooh! puts a sighted viewer on extreme edge like as soon as I look at this I kind of gasp in uncomfortable anticipation of the inevitable slicing. And it's far more effective than if you show like a blood soaked really gory image. Ah ha.
JJ Hunt:This is effective. This gets you... I've got goosebumps looking at it right now. It's so much more effective. Really cool.
Christine Malec:Oh wow, I want to do an episode now on photographs like that, that are instances, like catching an instant in time I just put that as a seed because I think there must be a whole sort of sub genre of photos that do that.
JJ Hunt:Totally. Absolutely. Images that are, I mean some that are terrifying that have you right on the edge of your Interesting. Future episode. seat, and then there's the kin of the the other side of i There you go. Fiture episode alert. So number 11 is the which is why are some ima es and visuals so sat sfying? Like the raking of th raking of sand in a Japanese arden. There's something abou the visual of that even if you're not the one doing it. hy is that so satisfying? In a not dissimilar to Why is t is so terrifying? Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. You cannot do an album lists and album art list without talking about this one because it is super weird, totally iconic. And honestly, I could take hours if I described every element of it, it would take hours in broad strokes. Okay, here we have the late 1960s. Beatles dressed in colorful, cartoonish military uniforms. They're posing before an ornamental garden that reads Beatles in red flowers and a marching band drum that says Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in red, green and yellow circus lettering and they are surrounded by cardboard cutouts of like 60 some odd celebrities including Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, the boxer Sonny Liston, WC Fields, Mona Lisa, and wax museum statues of their younger selves. It is weird, it is wacky, it is colorful. And it's full of odd little details like there's a plastic looking palm tree. There are dolls and figurines that are tucked into the garden. It's really weird in this kind of the cutouts like they're the it's assembled with cutouts like a collage and the cutouts, the colors, the costumes that kind of gives the whole thing the look of like a Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation. It's really of the era it's so wonderfully weird, Lonely Hearts Club Band. Yeah, it's totally cool.
Christine Malec:The word psychedelic gets thrown around with respect to their later music and I don't really know what that means. But is that kind of evocative? Of that word?
JJ Hunt:Yeah. There are elements of this that certainly get played out in psychedelics. So some of the colors that the band, their marching band uniforms are like this bright, kind of almost greeny yellow, fuchsia, a sky, like a neon blue, and this red color, those colors when you start swirling them around, when you give them that kind of trippy movement, that's kind of the core of a lot of psychedelic art and psychedelic imagery. And that's what the Beatles are wearing. Those are the colors of their marching band uniforms. Really, really weird. Let's jump ahead to number seven Nirvana's Nevermind. And this is an iconic album cover, but it's also coming up again right now, it's in the news right now. So this album was released in 1991. And the cover features an underwater photo of a pudgy naked white baby boy, swimming in a pool. The background is bright blue, presumably the far side of the pool. And you can see the rippling of the surface of the water kind of overhead. The baby is facing us, arms are wide, legs are open and kicking back. So you've got a really clear view of the outie belly button and this baby's little penis. And that's important. In front of the baby is a $1 bill on a fishing hook luring the baby forward. So - Yeah, I know it's a it's a good commentary. It's a good it was a Gasp! very clever, interesting, good album cover. But it's in the
Christine Malec:Gasp! news again right now because the baby who is now 30 years old, is suing the estate of Kurt Cobain and suing the other members of Nirvana and several other managers and whatnot, claiming that they engaged in distribution of child pornography by using this naked baby photo of him.
JJ Hunt:This is in the news right now that this guy is suing them all for, I think $150,000 each defendant. It's a big big big lawsuit.
Christine Malec:[Whistle]
JJ Hunt:So yeah, that's Nevermind.
Christine Malec:If I'm correct, JJ, I think the number one on the Billboard chart actually has a tactile element.
JJ Hunt:It does. So the number one album according to billboard, the number one piece of album art is the Velvet Underground and Nico's The Velvet Underground and Nico, 1967. So this one was also designed by Andy Warhol. So this is the second one. Sticky Fingers album was designed by Andy Warhol and this one also designed by Andy Warhol. In some versions, it features the name of the artist in bold black all caps near our upper left so it reads the Velvet Underground and Nico. In earlier printings, that wasn't there at all. Earlier printings, they didn't have the name of the band, or album, the only thing you had on the original album cover - on a white sheet, a white background, is a big yellow banana.
Christine Malec:Ha ha ha.
JJ Hunt:This is an image by Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol's cursive name is written in the bottom right, but otherwise it' Ooooh. just a big yellow banana. It' a silk screen print origina So super suggestive. Peel slowly and see ly, you know, yellow banana w th some dark spots in black ink and it kind of curves down rom our upper right toward o r lower left, gently curving do n great big banana. But what akes it special is the tactile element because in early pres ings of the album, there was little note at the upper rig t right near the top of the ban na, and it said, "Peel slowly nd see." And the yellow banana w s in fact, a sticker. And if y
Christine Malec:So wait the inside of banana - just for u peeled off the banana sticker it was like peeling a banana and what you got underneath wa the fleshy, pink banana itself, this kind of pink color that is very distinctive. This s what would have been called uote unquote skin color in ou dated crayon sets. This is very fleshy white person pink, artoon color of a ban na. clarity - the inside of a banana does not look that color?
JJ Hunt:No, no. The inside of a banana is really just a pale pale pale yellow.
Christine Malec:Ok. just checking.
JJ Hunt:So when you peel this what you get is the look of the inside of banana, not the peel.
Christine Malec:Gotcha.
JJ Hunt:But the color is this fleshy pink color.
Christine Malec:Ha ha ha.
JJ Hunt:Super suggestive. And people were like, of course you had to appeal it, right? You get one of these, it's almost irresistible. But for those who did hold off and didn't peel it, they are feeling rather proud of themselves now because an original stereo pressing of the album - unpeeled! - is going for about five grand on eBay right now.
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