The best thing about McNight-Trontz’s book This Ain’t No Disco is the fact that it’s loaded with page after page of album covers. This Ain’t No Disco reminded me of why I wanted to be a graphic designer: between the late 70s and early 90s, I would sit for hours on end in my father’s music studio, sorting through album after album to admire the cover art. I know I’m not the only one out there who experienced music in this way.
Peter Saville’s work always made me stop and ask, “What’s this all about”; his cryptic covers for Republic and Power Corruption and Lies made me open up those sleeves and listen to New Order, who I probably never would have paid any attention to. Years later, the same thing happened when I stumbled over a Joy Division album in a music store (the CD now has a yellow flood to it), and when I learned that Saville was responsible, I connected the dots between those two bands. In McNight-Trontz’s book, you can look forward to hundreds of exuberant visualizations beyond Saville’s minimalism and mystery. Witness leopard skin, off-axis type, spandex, narrow ties, condensed sans serifs, sexual ambiguity, and even pixels. Flipping through this collection, you’ll revel in the way icons were created in a twelve-inch-square space, like the glowing shoes of Michael Ross’ cover for Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp. Adore Adam Ant, Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Toni Basil, and Pat Benatar, no matter their hairstyle.
McNight-Trontz peppers each image with details about the cover artist and photographer, as well as the year of production. It was new to me that Kraftwerk had used a different creative team for each of their albums (Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, and The Man-Machine), even though together they look very unified in art direction. Kraftwerk had a definite style, and with The Man-Machine, they used form language similar to Kandinsky and even Zwart. Quoting Nick de Ville, as cited in This Ain’t No Disco, “…there was a reaching out for other graphic forms with revolutionary credentials… [including] Russian constructivist tropes—bold, simple forms (including cut-out photographic elements), a restricted range of primary colours, emphatic sans-serif typefaces and liberal use of diagonals underpinning the dynamism of the layout.” McNight-Trontz feels that there was no singular style to be found, but one thing is certain, there was character, and the albums that came out of the New Wave in the 70s separated themselves from the pack with their appearance and sound—outrageous, to say the least. With some of the musicians being designers (or designers being musicians or designers being interested in music), it’s easy to understand why these artists were so image conscious: Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music controlled some cover art; Peter Saville was a founder of Factory Records; and three of the Talking Heads met at RISD.
Three hundred album covers fill the pages of This Ain’t No Disco, and I waxed nostalgic reading through who did which cover, but still wish the book was bigger and able to give a true depiction of scale. For every Saville or Kalman, lies an “Unknown” cover artist, who created something hip and bizarre at the same time. It’s easy to brush the whole movement off as nothing more than a gesture, but New Wave music was neither a style nor marketing tool. It was a reaction—a rebellion—and it sent much-needed electricity through the wallowing Top 40 music scene. This Ain’t No Disco reminds us that the cover art from the New Wave generation possessed as much power as its sound, and this is something we could use more of in our music marketplace today.
This Ain’t No Disco: New Wave Album Covers
Jennifer McKnight-Trontz
Hardcover: 256 pages
7.1 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches
Publisher: Chronicle
ISBN: 0811845427
Nice review Jason. In case any are looking, here's an amazing reference for Factory records graphics and history:
Cerysmatic Factory
On Nov.08.2005 at 12:09 PM