The Trend of the Full Body in a Situation
About a year ago I noticed a trend in pop music album art that I find unique to the past five years or so. The style can be summed up as “nearly-full-body photograph of the artist(s) in a situation.” In an effort to coin a catchier name for it the best I’ve been able to come up with is Full Body in a Situation cover. I found this style of artwork so ubiquitous that a few months ago I was compelled to start compiling them as they showed up in the deluge of music store and record label email lists I subscribe to. If you follow new releases at all, I’m sure you can already think of a few covers from the past couple years that fit the description.
I realize that the 2020s didn’t invent this format. These are all a part of a continuum. I can name a dozen examples of older albums that easily slide in beside my 2020s examples below. The difference here being that these feel … zeitgeisty. There might be a temptation to lump these in with portrait covers. Bjork, Madonna, David Bowie, all famous for having their face on nearly all their releases. Prince’s Purple Rain soundtrack and the back cover to his 1979 self titled album could also fit in here. What’s different is that they weren’t part of a greater trend. Sometimes there’s even reverence for past icons in this collection. The 2022 Ezra Collective: Where I’m Meant to Be cover art couldn’t be anything but a direct homage to Thelonious Monk’s 1968 album Underground, whose storied cover art could easily fit in to the gallery below. I have even included a couple new collections by dead icons John Lennon and David Bowie who posed for their on-trend photos a generation before.
The formula is flexible. The photos can be of any style or locale. They can be heavily digitally manipulated or have the appearance of raw realism. Realism or surrealism, nature scenes, street scenes, space-age, etc. There are a multitude of moods and lewks represented. Due to the nature of the music biz, albums by young pop stars make up the majority. Young artists have had their images promoted and exploited by the music industry since the beginning, and it’s undeniable that many of the covers I’m sharing have been created to cash in on the artist’s looks, but there’s more to it than that. There’s an undeniable intentionality that goes beyond sex-appeal in even the most prurient of these examples. Not to mention the fact that there are many, many included here that aren’t at all “sexy”.
I believe there are three factors that have lead to this trend.
The influencer-fication of fame. From tradwife reverse-lifehacks to Jackass-style gonzo weather journalism that no one asked for, anyone with a memorable look and interesting-ish things to say can find themselves broadcasting live to tens of thousands of people. YouTube hosts are getting speaking parts in Hollywood movies, and big name stars are sharing their favourite recipes on Tik Tok. The fandoms have unprecedented access to up-to-the-minute proof-of-life videos of their favs. In a world where an unending stream of celebrity selfies are on tap 24/7, a simple portrait on the cover of their album isn’t going to do. (TS’s most recent release illustrating exactly how boring the old way of doing this is.) The fans want something they’ve never seen before.
The popularization of vinyl records as wall-art. iTunes Music Store, the first mainstream online music store, opened over 20 years ago. The current pack of pop-music consumers have grown up during a time when album art is primarily a tiny glowing icon on a screen. The phrase “album cover” has joined the anachronistic terms “taping” and “rewind”. Somehow these words hold on for dear life to modern concepts that, like modern pugs, resemble their pedigree only passingly. The kids aren’t dumb, they know they were robbed of something great, which is why new releases from pop-music sensations both old and new aren’t complete without a vinyl pressing… in five different colours, three different covers, and a “limited edition” version of which they’ve pressed over 20,000 copies. Jaded snark aside, vinyl records are a lovely thing and large interesting artworks depicting your favourite artists are just one of many joys they contain.
The death of magazines. The likelihood that you’ve bought a magazine in the past month is almost nil. As a result, it’s rare to randomly encounter images that qualify as a “fashion shoot”, let alone something ambitious and fun like we used to find a dozen examples of every month, without specifically seeking them out. Most of the images that qualify today are of dour models in front of a pastel seamless on a retailer’s website. You can find interesting stuff on photographers’ socials, but you need to seek those out, and rarely will they contain any personalities the viewer is actually interested in. I can’t help but believe that there are thousands of photographers around the world itching to get their David LaChapelle-on. This style of photo really lends itself to album cover art and…. well nothing else really in modern media.
The battle to preserve, and communicate the self. As mentioned earlier, the punters have unprecedented access to imagery of any celebrity they want to look at. Not only is it trivial to find almost any photo ever taken of a public figure, but it’s just as easy to create deepfake photos that have never existed. (most of which never should have existed in the first place) In order to battle against this flood of uncontrollable imagery, the product an artist puts out is one of the few things that can be standardized across all outlets, both physical and online. This makes the cover image more important than it has ever been before. Vaguely illustrating the music isn’t good enough anymore. Today this image also fills the role of Official Portrait as well as Manifesto.
There are many other cultural trends that led us here: The ubiquity of high-resolution cameras. The fact that even the cheapest computers available are more than enough to do incredible things with photography. None of this new though, these resources have been around for a long time.
Now that I’ve dumped this onto my lonely corner of the internet I’m not sure if I will continue to collect these. If this were 15 years ago I would have created a tumblr dedicated to the Full Body in a Situation cover… and lost interest six months later. If the trend continues, maybe I’ll revisit this at the end of the decade. It is comforting to consider that despite the visual world becoming more and more of a postmodern-cyberpunk-mashup-collage every day; a style (or meme, if you prefer) can bubble up out of the mud and show off its new hotness.
Below is a gallery of album art that fit the genre to varying degrees. The early ones that defined it for me: ARCA, Caroline Polachek, and of course, Beyonce.
