Interpreting Album Art: Why you should travel to Pink Planet before listening to Pink Sweat$’s The Prelude
When we listen to recorded music, it is hardly ever a purely sonic experience. Whether we’re cueing up the music through taps on a screen or by pulling a record off the shelf, we are also (perhaps unconsciously) interacting with other visual and tactile elements that surround the music.
If you cued up Pink Sweat$’s hot new EP The Prelude this week, for example, you probably encountered this enticing cover:
Pink Sweat$, The Prelude (Atlantic, 2020)
When we see the cover art for a recording like The Prelude, what does it do for our experience of listening? Does it communicate anything? Does it change how we understand the music? Is it an important part of the musical experience, or is it something that could just as easily be discarded?
Photo by Dewang Gupta
For one possible answer to these questions we might look to the field of literary theory. For a long time scholars who studied literature were interested primarily in making observations about the “work itself.” So for a book—a novel, let’s say— the words, sentences, and paragraphs that conveyed the story were thought to contain the whole of the book’s meaning.
Gérard Genette (1930-2018)
But books are composed of many more elements than just their story. French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930-2018) proposed that to understand a book, we needed to consider a constellation of elements, some closer to the story or text, and others more distant. Though they are usually ignored in traditional literary analysis, Genette argued that things like section headings, prefaces, cover designs, publication formats, and even font styles contribute to the way we understand literature. These elements fall somewhere in between the text inside the book and the world outside the book, and Genette called them “paratext,” literally meaning beside or next to (para-) the main text.
Photo by Annie Spratt
According to Genette, part of what makes paratextual elements important is that they signal to the reader when she is entering the world of the text. (Could you imagine scrolling away on your phone and suddenly you were reading Great Expectations without so much as a book cover or title as warning?) But paratext is also more than a simple border between the novel and the outside world. Instead, Genette describes paratexts as a “vestibule,” a “fringe,” or as an “undecided zone.” In his words: “We are dealing in this case with a threshold,. . . which offers to anyone and everyone the possibility either of entering or of turning back.” For Genette, this threshold is so important because crossing through it primes the reader to receive the text appropriately.
Perhaps an album cover, too, is a kind of paratext for the music we hear, an entryway that we stand in and choose to either continue toward the music, or to turn away. If we do chose to continue into the music, passing through the entryway will inevitably shape how we experience it.
Returning to Pink Sweat$ and The Prelude — How does the cover create an interpretive entryway for the music? There are many possibilities, but here are a couple of my observations:
The cover invites us to join Pink Sweat$ in a playful fantasy world, which we might call “Pink Planet” (at the suggestion of the teddy bear’s shirt). The illustration features an oversized moon and pink sand dunes—not elements typically found in the reality of our blue planet. (Pink Planet is the title of Pink Sweat$’s forthcoming album previewed on The Prelude.)
The cover ironizes the sexy shirtless masculinity that one finds on other R&B album covers. (See, e.g., Usher 8701 or Trey Songz’s Ready.) Instead we see a realistic illustration of David Bowden (aka, Pink Sweat$) in all-pink loungewear, shirt gaping sleepily open, holding the hand of a teddy bear. Through the cover, Pink Sweat$ seems to ask the listener have fun with his music, but not to take it too seriously.
What do you think? You’ve seen the cover; do you want to follow Pink Sweat$ to the Pink Planet? Take a listen for yourself, and let us know in the comments how the cover shapes your experience of the EP.
