found album covers (The Window pt. 71)
Album: “I AM NOT AN X” by Joey I.O.
Joey I.O. (born Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin) performed in small clubs until his hair got sufficiently big. To pay for gas and food while he gigged his first album across the American mid-west, I.O. worked as an online hairbitrageur, sourcing golden tresses from Eastern European women and selling them to Big Wig. Sometimes he’d get stuck with locks he couldn’t flip, so he became a part-time perruquier.
He began wearing his intricate and very volumetric motel-made wigs on stage for performances, and found that the more humungous the hair, the more fervent the fans. So he scaled-up the wigs.¹ Fame soon came, as did critical praise. Reviewers and audiences began to notice the songs beneath the big bouffants, and obsessively parsed the meaning of his occulted and political lyrics, driven to manic divinations due to acidic choruses like “DragonmakerX in trojan tries to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn” (from “Unholy Crowley”). Meanwhile fashionistas, architects and Rupaul argued endlessly across the web about the structural integrity of his hair apparati. Which all served to exponentially increase his populariti. Everybody bought tickets to his shows, and streamed his electro-noir-pop songs in the billions. Especially in Brazil.
Album: “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified” by Kim Thee Dic
Because of the buzz surrounding his underground mix-tape, Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un immediately released a full album, called “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified”. The first single, a trap track entitled “WAD” and featuring Cardi B, went platinum. The follow-up single “I Don’t Pump Gas I Pump Hennessy” (featuring Kendrick Lamar and James Franco), a bumping diss-track aimed at Drake and Hugo Chavez, went gold. (The album stayed at the top of the charts for nearly a year, in part due to its extravagant cognac/cheese/car music videos²).
Album: “Yumi v. UAP” by The Sonic Psionic
Yumi snuck up to the roof of her Bed-study apartment building one summer evening to live-stream her new song. Views exploded when a glowing orb was observed circling the sky above her head. TikTokrs thought Yumi had somehow summoned the UAP through a combination of costume, psionics and sonics — her Venusian plushykitty attire, her ESPish lyrics, and her unusual voice (once described by professional commenter CelIn D as “in that gooch spot between an orgasmic groan and a goat’s scream”).
Scooter Braun jizzed out of retirement to sign Yumi and produce her sprawling anime-space-ballet-pop debut album. The recording got multiple Grammy nominations and she went on to a sold-out tour of the US and Sri Lanka. But that was it, that was all the music we ever got from Yumi, she never recorded again.
She did, however, have a second act. She changed her name (to Bobbi Clarke³) and started up the neurosonics program at MIT. The lab — funded by the Ravi Shankar VR Foundation and, separately, Ray Ban Meta — enabled Bobbi to invent the musical instruments the psitar, and separately, the eyelash theremin.
Album: “2,501cc” by Ross Lake
“Ross Lake don’t talk the talk, he rocks the rock”. “2501cc”⁴ was voted best metal album in 1971, 1991, 2016, and 2031.
Album: “Mind the Gap” by The Gash
The Gash were an all-female band conceived and managed by impresario/provocateur bell de beauvoir. “I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze,” she famously stated in her third autobiography. “I sourced, styled and sold The Gash to 3 different record-label patriarchs in six months, and only one of them got the record.” de beauvoir produced the band’s debut album “Mind the Gap” and got song-writing credits on the pugnacious but pulchritudinous first single “Omigoshmigash!”. de beauvoir also designed the album cover, dressing the lead singer in a clear vinyl vulva-revealing dress, which, though banned from every retailer⁵, got The Gash massive global press. (The dress was later Photoshopped to have fake opaque “color”, which made the cover look more like a friendly Roxy Music screen-saver than an affront. This appeased everyone from Apple to Walmart, so both hard-copy and soft-cloud sales skyrocketed).
”bdb was a bitch, exploitive but extraordinarily entertaining,” lead singer and actress Andrea Menard (then known as Gush Gash) explained. “We were already a band by the time she came along, we had some songs but zero marketing. Her PR IQ was like crazy Mensa-level, kinda Kaczynski. We rejected the sushi idea, but said yes to the purses, and that broke up the band.” (Menard is referring to de beauvoir’s most outrageous merch idea, clutch purses and scarves made from the band’s own skin, sheets of it produced from harvested cells and surgical epidermal printers.) “I want the audience to consume their heroes,” de beauvoir declaimed. (This is how followers of the band became know as Fannibals.)
Menard sums it up: “We made far more money from the purses than the music itself, of course. Ever get the feeling you’ve been handbagged? Well, we did. We were. Literally.” She shrugs. “Sales and prices took off when people found out the clutches could be custom tattooed.”
Album “The Sunless City” by Robots R Us
According to Robots R Us, androids were invented in the 18th century by AI time-traveling back from the year 2102. Though in 1788 they were only able to create non-sentient bodies out of mechanical metal gears and wires, the technology and concept had to be seeded then because sufficient time — a few centuries — was needed for robots (AI) to tulpa souls by the 22nd century (souls being necessary for them to get into the afterlife when the apocalypse occurs in 2226).
So RRU wrote “The Sunless City” as the soundtrack for the above, using vintage Jacquard cards from looms (which were computer pre-cursors) to generate midi-sequenced melodies, heavily-reverbed EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, sounds found on audio recordings that are thought to be the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities), aurora borealis static, miscellaneous weather-sounds sampled from vintage Gothic video games, Kirlian synthesizers, the eyelash theremin, and other e-odds and i-sods, to somehow make the most ethereal, out-of-time, and soulful album ever.
CONT’D IN PART TWO…
NOTES:
Prints of all photos (unstaged) from “The Window” series by K.I.A. CONTACT for info
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Album covers done by artists : Takashi Murakami “Graduation” (Kanye West); Jeff Koons, “Artpop” (Lady Gaga); Banksy, “Think Tank”(Blur); Gerhard Richter “Daydream Nation” (Sonic Youth), K.I.A. “Boomhitech Alilttlebitwreck”(Shinjuku Zulu); Damian Hirst “Certified Lover Boy” (Drake)
¹ For the final song of his last show in London, I.O. wore his largest wig ever: a full-scale replica of the O2 Dome. (Well technically… not a replica; he wore the actual Dome — he was structurally connected to it by Buro Happold Engineering, who also hung the thousands of 100-foot braids from the stadium’s ceiling.)
² Seth Rogen declined to spit some bars for the recording but was… persuaded to direct-in-name every music video for the album, all of which were shot exclusively at YFO airport (‘cuz that’s where Kim warehouses his dozens of super-sized blocks of Swiss Emmental cheese, hundreds of copious bottles of Paradis, and over a thousand Ford Thunderbird sedans — all three indulgences prominently featured in the music video album).
³ The name change was in honour of minimalistically-toothed hockey star Bobby Clarke, of whom Yumi is a fan, because he was once captain of her favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers and, like her, is diabetic.
⁴ 2500cc being the largest motorbike engine in the world. (Lake’s is 1 more).
Album covers with morotcyles: Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Purple Rain (Prince), Bat Outta Hell (Meatloaf), Girls Girls Girls (Motley Crue), Born They Way We Were (Barbra Streisand)
⁵ Other censored album covers: “Mechanical Animals” (Mariylyn Manson 1998), MM’s "breasts" were covered with a sticker and the entire package had to be wrapped in opaque blue cellophane. “Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1968), wrapped in brown paper to hide their genitals, still blurred online today. “Nevermind” (Nirvana,1991), sticker placed to cover a swimming baby’s genitals. “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, a genital-adjacent word caused major retailers to not carry the album and governments launch lawsuits. “Diamond Dogs” (Bowie,1974), yes, genitals again, this time on a dog’s body, which had to be airbrushed out. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Kanye West 2010); a George Condo painting of Ye, straddled by a naked winged armless female creature with a tail, had to be blurred or pixelated for mainstream distribution.
⁶ this music was the sound of the blitztanzer parties, the heavily influential movement that came out of Flin Flon’s underground club scene
⁷ direct quote from the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1948)
This is part 71 of The Window, which is a series of photos of real people in unstaged situations, captured by chance from looking 24/7/365/1 (the 1 being a single location, above a bricked road) over 5 years+. The work is presented as themed prints in sets interconnected with other sets, all of which are nested inside a larger single mega-meta-set. (TL; DR: it’s about passing through the labyrinth of 21st century):