The Hidden Meaning Behind These Album Covers

An album cover is almost as important as the music contained on the record or CD within. (Or, you know, the list of iTunes tracks next to a thumbnail image of that artwork.) A great piece of album art can tie an album together, give listeners something to cool to look at while they groove to the tunes, or provide clues about the inspirations behind the music ... or just be an obtuse series of nonsensical, random images. Here are some famous album covers in which there's far more than meets the eye, which is to say they actually do have a point.

The "brother-sister" (actually ex-husband-wife) Detroit folk-punk duo released their fourth album, Elephant, in 2003, which boasted one banger after another, like "Seven Nation Army" and "The Hardest Button to Button." The sound that came out of just two musicians was huge, kind of like ... an elephant. Jack White says the grand beast appears on the jacket. In Jason Draper's A Brief History of Album Covers (via Diffuser), White claims, "If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it's a side view an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side." OK, well, all that seems to be there are the Whites in their usual classic Nashville finery, along with an amplifier and a cricket bat. But if Jack White says there's an elephant on Elephant, there must be an elephant on Elephant. (To be fair, if you squint, you can see the rough shapes.)

Over the past decade and change, Rihanna has evolved from a singer of throwaway dance singles into a complex and challenging musician. Her album covers have evolved, too. Gone are the glamorous, sexy shots adorning Good Girl Gone Bad and A Girl Like Me. In their place: provocative, thoughtful covers like ANTI. The 2016 album features an artfully out-of-focus image of a child, wearing a crown and holding a black balloon, against a white and blood-red background, along with some Braille messages. It's the work of an artist named Roy Nachum. "He sees things beyond the surface, which is why we even decided to collaborate," RiRi said at the album's cover launch party. (Yeah, the cover is so tight it got its own launch party.) 

Nachum started with a real childhood snapshot of the singer, taken on her first day of daycare at age five. "The crown over the eyes is a symbol for the music," Nachum told Rolling Stone. "Here, I painted the young Rihanna bringing something new." The Braille message, for those who don't read Braille with their eyes, is from a poem called "If They Let Us" by Chloe Mitchell. An excerpt: "I sometimes fear that I am misunderstood. / It is simply because what I want to say, / what I need to say, won't be heard." As this is the album that includes some of Rihanna's boldest work ever, message received.

Not too many artists have a mascot. Sure, Iron Maiden featured its monstrous Eddie the Head on stage and on album jackets, and the '70s/'80s soft rock/country group Pure Prairie League put a cartoon cowboy on the front of all its records. And then there's Kanye West's "Dropout Bear," who first appears on the front of the rapper's game-changing 2004 debut The College Dropout, sitting forlornly on some gym bleachers. Plain Pat, West's manager at the time, confirms that it's Yeezy himself inside the bear suit, and also that the bear doesn't have any much meaning at all. "The bear just happened to be at the school where Def Jam had booked the photo shoot for the album," Plain Pat told Complex in 2014.

The cover of Arcade Fire's second album is a static image — we're not into the era of Harry Potter-style moving images for covers quite yet — but upon a closer inspection, does it look like the pages of that open book made of light are in motion? Well, good, because that was the intent of cover artist Tracy Maurice, part of the same Montreal art community that spawned Arcade Fire. Once the band had decided on Neon Bible for a title, Maurice erected a 7-foot-tall book made out of neon — you know, like a neon bible. The band and Maurice planned to bring the piece on the road and hang it "as a backdrop at live shows, but it turned out it was too fragile to transport," Maurice told Billboard. For the cover, Maurice filmed the flickering sign with a 16 mm camera, then overlaid three separate frames to create that eerie image.

So what is a "neon bible"? Arcade Fire leader Win Butler took that from the novel of the same name, a lesser work by A Confederacy of Dunces author John Kennedy Toole. Butler told AV Club that while he's read the book, the name is a coincidence. "I just jotted it down in my notebook and kept coming back to it," he said.

Radiohead's most experimental album to that point (since surpassed every time Radiohead releases an album) was its trippy masterpiece Kid A. Oddly, it's not the Radiohead album that included the song "Knives Out," because Kid A's dreamy, science-fictiony cover art was painted with knives (and sticks) instead of paintbrushes. "I got these huge canvases for what became Kid A, and I went mental using knives and sticks to paint with and having those photographed and then doing things to the photographs in Photoshop," designer Stanley Donwood explained to NME. The result was an image that Donwood says was intended to suggest "landscapes of power," specifically "some sort of cataclysmic power existing in landscape." Donwood was successful because "some sort of cataclysmic power" is a succinct and perfect explanation of Kid A.

Fans of '90s West Coast rap, here's a truth bomb: Dr. Dre and his protégé and frequent collaborator Snoop Dogg are very big fans of marijuana. One clue to their enjoyment of the herb is the fact that Dr. Dre titled his first post-N.W.A. album The Chronic. That's a slang term for extremely strong marijuana. Another hint that Dre enjoys the sticky icky: the album's art suggests the packaging used on Zig-Zag rolling papers for decades. (Marijuana is encased into a rolling paper to create a cigarette-like thing called a "joint," you see.)

After the death of singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division necessarily evolved into New Order. The band brought along its favorite designer, Peter Saville, who designed the cover for many of its records, include Power, Corruption & Lies. When Saville heard the title, he later told The Guardian that he thought it sounded "Machiavellian," as in reflective of the dark and ruthless writings of 16th-century Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. His most famous work is The Prince, and so Saville headed to the National Portrait Gallery in London in search of a portrait of a "dark prince" to use as an album cover. 

Does that seem a little on the nose? Saville agreed while at the museum, finding it "too obvious." He and his girlfriend exited through the gift shop, where Saville picked up a postcard of a painting of flowers by 19th-century French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. Saville's girlfriend told him that ought to be the cover. "It was a wonderful idea," Saville said. "Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption, and lies infiltrate our lives. They're seductive." Heady stuff for an album of synth-pop.

Aubrey Powell co-founded a design studio called Hipgnosis, which frequently worked with Pink Floyd, including its album Wish You Were Here. According to Powell's book Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art, (via Rolling Stone), the album's lyrics "were all about insincerity and absence" and how the recording industry is "a moveable beast that actually takes casualties with it" ... such as ex-Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, who officially left the band in 1968 because of mental health issues. (He's also the inspiration for the Wish You Were Here standout "Shine On You Crazy Diamond.") Hipgnosis's other chief creative, Storm Thorgerson, wanted to reflect that tone (prominent in songs about destructive and empty promises, like "Welcome to the Machine" and "Have a Cigar") and mock the music industry by literally depicting the then-common expression, "I've been burnt," i.e., "ripped off." He suggested two guys in suits shaking hands — the internationally recognized image of businessmen making a deal — but with one of them on fire. They hired a stunt man, and lit him on fire, and a photographer snapped the iconic image on the 15th shot. (Poor stunt man.)

Hipgnosis did a lot of work for Pink Floyd, but that band wasn't the only beneficiary of its creepy-meets-pretentious aesthetic. The company produced the artwork for Argus, an album by the relatively obscure prog-rock band Wishbone Ash. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page saw it, liked the vibe, and asked Hipgnosis co-founder Aubrey Powell to create the art for an upcoming album from his band. As he related in his book Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art (via Rolling Stone), Page didn't yet have a title and refused to describe the nature of the music or the lyrics. "Meet me in three weeks, and come up with some ideas. You know the kind of band we are," Page instructed. 

One of the sketches Powell brought to the meeting was a visualization of the end of Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi classic Childhood's End. "There was this image of all the children of the Earth rising up in this great firestorm and going up into outer space," Powell said. The drawing of kids rising upward strongly reminded Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant of the imposing basalt columns that make up a formation in Northern Ireland called Giant's Causeway. A few weeks later, Powell organized a photo shoot on those rocks — which included, well, naked children, along with their parents, some chaperones, and makeup artists.

The too-good-for-this-world-anyway David Bowie died in January 2016, saddening and shocking anyone who ever cared about music. He'd just released his latest album, Blackstar, a couple days earlier to rave reviews. (Pitchfork gave it an 8.5 out of 10; NPR called it "feral, instinctive," and also "brutal and finessed.") The sad truth is that Bowie had been privately dealing with terminal cancer, and Blackstar was his intended swan song. The songs, and even the album's cover, are full of insights only the Goblin King/Ziggy Stardust/The Thin White Duke could provide. 

One of those is the title and striking primary cover image: Blackstar and a black star, respectively. That's an alternate way to describe a black hole, a collapsed star that sucks in everything that comes near. It all makes for an apt and striking metaphor for human mortality, particularly when that mortality is the result of the unrelenting, life-sucking destructiveness of cancer. Jonathan Barnbrook designed five covers for Bowie, including Blackstar. "This was a man who was facing his own mortality," Barnbrook told Dezeen. The symbol of a black star on white "has a sort of finality, a darkness, a simplicity, which is a representation of the music." Barnbrook further explained that "the idea of mortality is in there, and of course the idea of a black hole sucking in everything, the Big Bang, the start of the universe, if there is an end to the universe." What have you been doing lately?