128. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

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The album is listed as number 479 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

The work above is a vertical flip and mirroring of the cover art. The band's name and album title were kept upright but in shuffled positions.
I got it - it was done to make fun. 


It's a photograph by Joel Brodsky of Barbara Cheeseborough.
He is credited with photographing over 400 album covers, among them by The Doors, Isaac Hayes and Van Morrison.
She was a Philadelphia-born fashion model who was known for promoting an Afrocentric style and who appeared on Essence Magazine's first cover in May 1970. wikipedia

Essence

This is the original album cover art design.

No. 479, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Photograph by Joel Brodsky; artwork design by Graffiteria/Paula Bisacca; art direction by David Krieger.
The model is Barbara Cheeseborough.
Album produced by George Clinton. Westbound 1971. 

“Maggot Brain.” The very name connotes ugliness, vileness, and disgust.
Considering the front cover art depicting a black woman up to her neck in dirt screaming in agony
and the back cover of said woman’s head now a skull, maybe that’s what George Clinton and his merry band of funksters wanted —
to get inside your brain and melt it into a pile of steaming funk. Solid Grooves

Maggot Brain features one of the more unfortunate covers in music history, with its front cover depicting a black woman buried up to her neck screaming
in agony and back cover showing the same woman’s head, now become a skull. Why, it’s almost as creepy as the cover of Herbie Mann’s Push Push,
on which Herbie shows off his ghastly lubed-up chest pelt for reasons I don’t care to speculate about. And the same goes for Maggot Brain.
Then again, what do you expect from a band that entitles an LP Maggot Brain in the first place? P-Funk was a crazy-eyed crew of
acid-gobbling freaks, and on LSD everything seems like a grand idea. The Vinyl District

(A) Maggot Brain - Can You Get to That - Hit It and Quit It - You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks 

(B) Super Stupid - Back in Our Minds - Wars of Armageddon

"Maggot Brain" live from bushtales on YouTube

    

georgeclinton.com

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124. Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame

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My purpose for tweaking is always to convert a square album cover into a stretched screensaver or wallpaper.  On this work,  the original album cover art design is at
left.  The clouds and  horizon were stretched to the right  through a combination of mirroring and paste overs.  Four more  cut-outs of the lady cutter were added in 
progressively  smaller sizes to create an illusion of space and distance.

I might disagree  with some other  interpretations of the original art work,  but to me,  it simply looks  like what it is - a woman with a sickle  trying to fight off an
unseen or some imaginary demon - or making a symbolic stab at the heavens as an utterance of a curse.


The cover artwork is a photograph, but is intended to resemble a painting. It depicts a woman cutting grain in an East Anglian field, near Duxford in Cambridgeshire.
It was taken by Brian Griffin (who had previously done the cover photograph for Speak & Spell and press photos for the band) using a mixture of natural and artificial
lighting.  Griffin cited  as inspirations  Ukrainian and Russian art,  especially  the work of Kazimir Malevich,  and German  romantic art.  Griffin has  displayed on his
website a gallery of alternative images from the same shoot.

It was featured on the cover of Life Magazine's 1990 edition of "World's Best Photographs 1980 - 1990". wikipedia

Images from briangriffin.co.uk



The awards continued that year (1989) when The Guardian newspaper in the U.K.  named Griffin “The Photographer
of the Decade”  and his photo shot for the cover of  Depeche Mode’s  1982 album,  A Broken Frame, was featured on
the cover of  Life Magazine’s  special issue,  “The Greatest  Photographs  of the ‘80s”.  All along  the way,  Brian has
been the recipient of many other honors, winning numerous D&AD awards and his book Work was awarded the “Best
Photographic Book In The World” at the Primavera Fotográfica in Barcelona, Spain. Album Cover Hall of Fame

Photo by Brian Griffin, design by Martyn Atkins, calligraphy by Ching Ching Lee, clothes design by Jacqui Frye.
Album produced by Depeche Mode & Daniel Miller. Mute/Sire (US & Canada) 1982.


Martin Gore  has famously  noted that Depeche Mode  stopped worrying  about its future when the first  post-Vince Clarke-departure single,  "See You," placed even
higher on the English charts than anything else Clarke had done with them. Such confidence carries through all of A Broken Frame, a notably more ambitious effort
than the pure pop/disco of the band's debut.  With arranging genius  Alan Wilder still one album away from fully joining the band,  Frame became very much Gore's
record,  writing all the songs and exploring various styles never again touched upon in later years.  "Satellite" and "Monument" take distinct dub/reggae turns, while
"Shouldn't Have Done That"  delivers its slightly precious message about the dangers of adulthood with a spare arrangement and hollow,  weirdly sweet vocals. Much
of the album follows in a dark vein,  forsaking  earlier sprightliness,  aside from tracks like "A Photograph of You" and  "The Meaning of Love,"  for more melancholy
reflections about love gone wrong as "Leave in Silence" and "My Secret Garden."  More complex arrangements and juxtaposed sounds, such as the sparkle of breaking
glass in  "Leave in Silence,"  help give this underrated  album even  more of an intriguing,  unexpected edge.  Gore's lyrics  sometimes veer on the facile,  but David
Gahan's singing comes more clearly to the fore throughout -- things aren't all there yet, but they were definitely starting to get close. AllMusic Review by Ned Raggert

(A) Leave in Silence - My Secret Garden - Monument - Nothing to Fear - See You

(B) Satellite - The Meaning of Love - Further Excerpts from My Secret Garden - A Photograph of You - Shouldn't Have Done That - The Sun and the Rainfall

"See You" live from FedekDemod90 on YouTube.





    

www.depechemode.com

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112. Jose Feliciano - Angela

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This work was not meant to be complicated - it was just an experiment  with the Liquify filter on the sunshade,
the artist's fingers, the guitar strings and the letter F.

For all its simplicity,  I was also attempting  to create something  that would look  like two vertical planes;  one
from each of the two images - a front image at right and a back image at left, without  lightening or darkening
the blue background.  This I tried to achieve  by extending the guitar fretboard  beyond the picture frame of the
image at left and by placing a strip of black to  separate the two images and which  would create the impression
of a shadow to suggest that the right image is in front of the left image.

At first,  the idea  seemed perfect  -  with the extended  fretboard  inserted behind  the blue  background of the
front image,  the viewer,  looking at the  left image  from top to centre,  could approximate  that the  thickness
of the shadow is the same as the distance between the face of the guitar and the back of the artist.

The dilemma,  however,  proves that  the idea  was not perfect.  Looking  at the left image  from the bottom to
the centre,  the viewer would  now realise,  reckoning  from the shadow,  that the left  image is  not behind the
right but is in front of it. The extended fretboard could not resolve the dilemma - it is now at its centre. 

The partial  repetition of  the black  strip at  extreme right  produced a  certain unevenness  of the  plane of the
right image  -  it's as if the right  elbow of the artist is nearer  to the viewer  than his left hand.  And it does not
work to resolve the dilemma at left. Instead, it only adds to it. Such is the characteristic of a blivit or a Schuster
fork which is also featured in my immediately preceding work, The Grand Illusion by Styx.

Such is the characteristic of impossible objects.

Images & article from Brainden.com

Impossible  objects  really  get us chasing  our tail.  Our brain  tries  to do  its best  usually,  however,  there are
instances when it fails to process correctly what the eye sees.


The brain makes sense  of shapes and symbols.  It's trying to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle,  formulating
that which isn't there to that which is believable.  2D figure is sub-conscionsly  interpreted as  3D object although
such object can not exist.

Here's the original album cover art design.

Cover illustration by George Stavrinos, album design by Neil Terk &
Co., art direction by Beverly Weinstein & Janna Merlyn Feliciano.
Album produced by Anna Merlyn Feliciano & Jose Feliciano.
Private Stock 1976.

Aaron Loves Angela is about two teenagers living in the slums of New York City who are deeply in love with each
other.  Angela (Irene Cara),  who is  Puerto Rican,  falls in love  with Aaron  (Kevin Hooks),  who is black.  Their 
relationship is not approved by either of their parents. They both rebel against their parents' prejudices, but soon
find out that their friends and neighbours share the same prejudices as their parents.

The soundtrack was composed by José Feliciano and Janna Marlyn Feliciano, recorded and performed on the José
Feliciano album Angela. wikipedia 

Fame star Irene Cara made her film bow in Aaron Loves Angela.  Cara plays Angela, a Puerto Rican girl who falls
in love with Aaron,  a black ghetto youth (Kevin Hooks,  whose father Robert Hooks also appears in the film). The
unrelenting  grimness  of their  lives is leavened  ever so slightly  by comic-relief  character  Willie (Leon Pinkley).
Way, way down on the cast list is singer  Jose Feliciano,  making his unstressed acting debut.  The script for Aaron
Loves Angela is by Gerald Sanford, and appears to have been adapted from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Rotten Tomatoes

(A) Angela - I've Got a Feeling - Sweet Street - Nirvana

(B) Why - Michaelangelo - Salsa Negra - As Long as I Have You

"Angela" live from Ahmad F. Elyan on YouTube.

    

josefeliciano.com

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