The Loss Of Album Artwork

I caught the last gasp of the "Long Playing" (LP) album, with requisite fancy album cover, whilst coming of age in the late 70's-early 80's. It was quite an experience to buy music in those days. If you were lucky enough to be into a band that could put some bread into the artwork, the whole experience of listening to the music could be enhanced tremendously by the visuals. Yes/Crimson/Earthworks (among others) drummer Bill Bruford once opined that the album was your "mission statement"; indeed he was right. You could get a pretty good feel of the type of band you were about to listen to when you bought the album by the artwork employed by the band in question. Amongst my faves were Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, with its metallic presentation that represented the aggressive sophistication of the aforementioned recording quite well. A smart band with some artistic license could post a visual to its cover that could be tremendously arresting. A couple of additional cases in point: King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King, Yes Fragile and Close to the Edge, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (complete with real zipper), Jethro Tull Stand Up (which actually had pop-up characters when opening the gatefold), and of course, Sgt. Pepper's.

Great stuff, it was. Sadly, with the advent of the compact disc (CD), the artwork was shrunk to one quarter of the size of the LP's canvass. I never did get the same buzz from buying a CD as I did from opening up an LP for the first time. (Rarely did I buy cassette tape either, unless it was specifically to play on a boom box or play on a Sony Walkman.) Reading the liner notes, the lyrics, and peering at the artwork contributed tremendously to the experience. Even though too much care went into not scratching the LP, and inevitably one always did with repeated play, it was a rich experience that has been lost to the ages. Now, in the age of MP3s, one needn't even buy a CD, and so the artwork has become utterly disposable. A shame really, but then it is extraordinarily convenient to have the equivalent of twenty-four days worth of music at my disposal at the click of a keyboard. If an LP has approximately forty minutes of playing time, that equals 1.25 albums per hour in a 24 hour period, and I have 24 days worth of music (according to my iTunes indicator), I would have 720 LPs in my apartment. Sheesh.

Technological progress, for the most part, is a good thing. But there's always that is lost with the onset of said technology. I won't miss the cassette or the CD, but the loss of the album artwork made available by the LP is slightly bittersweet for me. However, I'm sure this won't be a lost piece of LP artwork, except to make fun of.