Multiple music blogs and sites have the 21-year-old Oakland rapper donning baseball-sized lenses with her tongue extended suggestively ready to taste the chilled treat in an advertisement for her debut single, "Gucci Gucci" (at right).
The song has gained plenty of traction, racking up more than 3 million YouTube views and inking her a record deal with Columbia, a speedy hitmaker turn to which Matisyahu can relate.
For some, "Gucci Gucci" is the summer jam of '11. Others are debating whether, as someone who is white and female, she's a hip-hop tourist.
I keep thinking about that cover. That's an unmistakable image in a long line of them when it comes to album covers and album art, from The Beatles' iconic stroll across a London street for Abbey Road to Carly Simon in a black negligee, stockings and knee-high black boots for Playing Possum to the naked baby in a pool on the front of Nirvana's Nevermind.
Despite arguments to the contrary, album art isn't dying. It is morphing.
When Apple made the fifth-generation iPods capable of portraying a full-color image, they restored value to cover art in the digital age. Music message boards are flooded with threads asking for high-quality cover art scans and images when a new album is issued.
All of my earlier examples were of records at least 20 years old, but there are some incredible, recent examples of how album art continues to dazzle: Animal Collective's optical illusion for Merriweather Post Pavilion (at left), Beck's do-it-yourself sticker pack for The Information, Lil Wayne's funny and alarmingly tatted toddler on Tha Carter III (below right), The Black Keys' charmingly themed Brothers.
There is an element related to album art that is dying, however. Liner notes are disappearing faster than the printed novel.
It is a lost art. Detailed descriptions of instrumentation and clues about the genesis of the song are gone.
They haven't been replaced. They're bygones of an earlier time in music.
It's symptomatic of the larger picture, which is artists not getting or receiving credit for their work, even if that credit comes in the form of cold hard cash. Digital sales might be on the rise, but as a delivery system for liner notes, the results thus far are less than impressive.
Legally, songwriter credit information needs to be out there. Even Sigur Rós' purposefully wordless ( ) album art has the necessary legal mumbo jumbo tacked on in tiny print. Some artists are opting to put this on their websites instead.
This isn't an issue with physical products, but as CDs continue a slow, steady decline into the dollar bin, even the resurgent sales of vinyl isn't enough to compensate for the difference.
Lyric sheets are nice, but more of a luxury item. They help guide and explore our journey through a record better, but they're not absolutely necessary tools.
When people could start getting the music for free, many fans took a laissez-faire attitude about the liner notes and the cover art, which is a shame because there are so many clues, connections and tidbits of information which can be packed. There's little revealing connections that even songwriter credits can tell you, such as the M. Jagger and K. Richards listed on The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" that explain why the British group earned exactly zero dollars for that song.
While that may be changing, album art is still vital and Kreayshawn is a purposeful, polished image why.
While there isn't anything particularly thought provoking about Kreayshawn being an instant away from lapping up that red popsicle, it is a memorable image. It doesn't tell you much about the music contained within, but neither do Coltrane's Sound or Cut Copy's Zonoscope (at left).
What the cover for "Gucci Gucci" does say is that the artist is white, young and has an intense interest in frozen sweets.
And those are things that will have people discussing her long after that popsicle melts.
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