Gift Wrap

Gift of Screws (Album Cover Art), Lindsey Buckingham
Album Cover Art Review by John Demetry

A friend of mine sent me this quote to illustrate his own reaction to the album cover art for Lindsey Buckingham's Gift of Screws:

"'Despair' is a sin (since it involves the abandonment of hope in eternity). So I opt instead for 'desolation,' which is not a sin, merely a psychological response to everything around one being in an advanced state of disintegration." - David Warren, Essays On Our Times

Once upon a time, a record sleeve beckoned the consumer to check out the music inside. At home, everyone from teenagers of all genders with schoolgirl crushes or music aficionados of all ages sprawled out on their bedroom floors taking in the record sleeves -- the art design, the track lists, the lyrics -- while the music played. The vinyl medium forced the listener to remain attentive, so as to flip the disc over when the side completed. Record sleeves served many purposes: something tactile, functional, and beautiful. It helped unify the experience. That's part of how art was bourne out of the necessities of the medium -- and the desires of the mass audience.

Times changed. First, Compact Discs, then iPods shrank album cover art to miniature size. One might counter that the iNternet age features different ways of viewing and experiencing album cover art. Examples: iTunes permits the listener to expand the size of the album cover art, iTV blows up album cover art to the high-definition size of a television screen, Internet advertising features the album cover art -- making it available for copying and pasting. If you want to be interactive, you can set album cover art as your desktop wallpaper. Like the music itself, in these contexts, album cover art becomes background noise -- and status symbols. Each technological "advance" signals economic disparity and aesthetic disconnect. This shift indicates that the relationship between pop audiences and pop art is "in an advanced state of disintegration." To quote Armond White in First of The Month on the shrinkage problem (here, in reference to movies): "As movies shrink, so does their popular effect."

No wonder Lindsey Buckingham, like Warren quoted above, opts for "desolation" -- as represented by the cover art of his upcoming album Gift of Screws (release: 09/16/08). He conveys this response via a combination of elements:

1) the directness of Buckingham's pose
2) the blurriness of the photograph in contrast to the clarity of the font
3) the lighting that draws the hollows in his cheeks and the depths of his eye sockets while shading the right side of his face
4) the contrast of the photograph's palette
5) the white font of his name that recesses and the red font of the album title that pops (establishing perspective)

These compositional components are experienced in a different way than album covers past. Remember, album covers are not, now, primarily tactile objects. Back in 1979, David Byrne and Talking Heads highlighted the significance of that tactility with the raised black-on-black manhole-cover design for Fear of Music. The cover of Gift of Screws is not as sublimely rendered as Byrne's pomo conception. Talking Heads in 1979 made you feel twice.

Buckingham in 2008 makes you look twice. Confronted with the off-putting presentation of Buckingham's countenance, many Mac fanboard members expressed the anxiety it elicits in terms existential (nausea), mortal (illness/corpse), and scatological (you can imagine). You try to shake the cobwebs, to blink Buckingham back into focus, to shift perspective from the clear foreground (text) to the blurred background (photograph). The picture remains blurry, but a second look clarifies its meaning.

As amateur photographer and economist Gaston Diaz points out, the photographer snapped the picture while the camera was in motion -- as if it were bumped. Therefore, the photograph actually puts Buckingham in the context of the world's instability. That accounts for the facial expression and contours that signify "desolation": loneliness and woe. The muted -- almost black-and-white or sepia -- palette and off-center lighting emphasize Buckingham as form. This form's lines etch his experiences: of art-making, of 21st-Century consciousness. When I saw the Gift of Screws cover, I thought: "That's how I feel when I'm watching the news." Is that connection amidst disintegration the "gift of screws"?

Buckingham took the album's title from an Emily Dickinson poem:

Essential oils are wrung
The atter from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.

Writing on Dickinson in The Atlantic, Martha Hale Shackford explained that in these lines "irony and paradox appear in those analyses of truth where [Dickinson] reveals the deep note of tragic idealism." As described above, Buckingham makes the experience of "irony and paradox" visually palpable (like Dickinson's essential oils/atter; suns/screws dichotomies). On first look at the Gift of Screws album cover, one experiences the world's instability. On second look -- with a turn of the screw -- one finds the promise of a shared sense of desolation. The experience of pathos sustains -- in fact, requires -- one's "hope in eternity."

Buckingham expresses this combination of suffering and hope -- humility really -- with his bent frame and upward eyeline. All of Buckingham's solo albums feature him on the cover -- as if to distinguish those works from his with Fleetwood Mac (not unlike Bryan Ferry's or Morrissey's portraits on their solo outings). With each album cover, the eyelines reflect the tone of their respective albums: introspective (Under the Skin (2006)), restless (Out of the Cradle (1992)), paranoid (Go Insane (1985)), and covetous (Law and Order (1981)). Of all those covers, Gift of Screws is most similar -- compositionally -- to Law and Order.

On that 1981 cover, Buckingham both expresses desire and makes of himself a conspicuous object of desire. The black-and-white photograph makes him look burnished, a gold dust man. Here, Buckingham's exaggerated tan -- suggestively exotic -- resembles the iconic Jon Hall in John Ford's film The Hurricane (1937). Indeed, Buckingham cites Ford as a favorite filmmaker. Buckingham seemingly intuits in Ford's films the aesthetic of uncontainable desire within social structures: such as manifest destiny and hegemony (i.e. Law and Order). Ford, most famous for directing Westerns, probably provides the inspiration for the Monument Valley-cum-L.A. metaphor of the sublime "Shadow of the West" on Side 2 of Law and Order. Notably, "Shadow of the West" is the only song on Law and Order with no lyrics printed in the liner notes. This cues listeners to shift attention to the album cover, which speaks for these lyrics:

Memories like shadows scorched in the sand
I'm alone, a lonely man
The setting of the sun scares me to death
I'm a shadow of the west

The cover of Gift of Screws awakens consciousness to these anxieties (isolation, mortality) through a disruptive process of "irony and paradox." Law and Order's cover kept up with radical changes in pop music representation (post-punk, New Wave) by simultaneously synching with Ford's (Hollywood's) ambisexual codification of desire (concurrent with the music's sublime nostalgia). Now, Buckingham addresses contemporary folly by tightening the screws on that earlier image. He wrings a spiritual understanding from the earlier representation of uncontainable desire and shared sensitivity. Regarded as a completed cycle, the artwork for Law and Order and Gift of Screws charts the genesis of Beefcake back to the source of Desire -- an understanding that might come with age or even parenthood. This new album cover indicates that Buckingham remains attuned to the needs of the millennial audience -- even as the image suggests an artist who might not be simpatico with the contemporary popular idiom. This bright knight rejects the fashionable pose of "despair."