The Extratextuals

I’ve been meaning for a while to comment on the Album Cover generator meme running around Facebook and elsewhere. A meme about extratextuals is too good to ignore, and it provides a good opportunity to discuss the flatness and the seeming paint-by-numbers nature of many extratextuals.

First, though, for those of you who don’t know the meme, here’s how it works:

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover (it will need to be a .jpg, not a .gif or .bmp).

4 – Use Photoshop (or similar) to put it all together.

5 – Post it to Facebook as a note and tag the friends you want to join in.

More after the fold

I did two, and was quite amused by both, and by what a random generator could come up with. The first seems like a band that’s modeling itself on Live, trying to be heavy/edgy, yet probably not really all that much of either. The second is clearly a campus band: Family Guy writers meet Crash Test Dummies, with lyrics that rhyme Kierkegaard with Skeletor.

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I’m also very impressed by this ironically posh Brit pop band that Ethan Thompson came up with:

More impressive than any one album cover, though, is how easy it is to match the industry with such randomness. Compare the above, for instance, with the new U2 (a random Wikipedia entry name for a band if ever I heard one) album, No Line on the Horizon:

Or even this famous album cover from Nirvana for Nevermind:

Or check out these pricelessly bad covers at a site I found while searching for pics for this entry, The Museum of Bad Album Covers:

In looking at all of these, though, I am struck by the importance of font. Ethan’s works so brilliantly, for instance, because he found a great font. I’m relatively proud of the fonts for Drug Eruption and Pastured Poultry too. Or look at Nirvana’s or Moving Gelatine Plates’. When so much else can be determined randomly, maybe it’s the font in an album cover that does all the work? Let’s experiment:

The second looks like a techno album, or some kind of trance music for raves, whereas the first one is indy, and probably really bad with even worse production values (can anything good come of the Comic Sans font?). Of course, we could play the same game and change the band name (random generator comes up with “Diatonic Set Theory”), and all of a sudden a rock band (or techno or indy) becomes definitively techno, or wanky pretentious university band; or we could change the album name (random generator comes up with Reason to Fear This) for something heavier; or the picture (to the below, randomly generated pic) and we get a female singer-songwriter album a la Ingrid Michaelsson:

The point is that we’ve all got such a remarkable sense of genre that tiny variables cue us to what we’re seeing. Flip through your television’s channels, and you’ll likely get the genre in two seconds or less for every show. There’s almost a threat behind this – is that much art that easy to peg? When we go on and on about “bold new sounds” and “cutting edge” this or that, and fetishize originality, it still seems as though genre has most bands, shows, etc. in a vice grip. The “moral” of this story isn’t that originality is dead, though; rather, it’s that originality almost always comes in tiny changes – in a different font, in the use of a different type of guitar, in a character having a different job than one might expect. The flatness of originality suggested by the album cover meme, therefore, shouldn’t actually be a surprise, as most paratexts and most texts have no such thing as an overt originality. It’s all about little changes. Yet like the shower knob that takes one from freezing to boiling with the slightest motion, so too might originality be “small” in motion, yet “big” in effect.

front covers, music album covers, Drug Eruption, genre, meme, Pastured Poultry, U2