Made in the am album cover harry
I took the Yeezus route and designed a thick sticker to seal the album so that listeners must tear it open to listen. There’s something a little acid house“Madchester” about it to me, a little Soup Dragons/Happy Mondays. ” That “lord’s light” got me thinking about the sound of the record - pillowy, heavenly, soft - and I decided to go with an iridescent holographic foil cover.
I dropped in and asked them, “What color do you think of when you think of Glory?” One of my friends said “blue,” just as I had also envisioned, but the other one said “I would want like a white gloss with Silver text. I consulted with my Facebook Messenger group over Glory after I had a hard time getting my original concept - a silver foil treatment of the title stamped into royal blue velvet - to work properly. Holographic foil covers were created by mixing images of holographic metal found on Pinterest with images of shiny sheets of silver metal. That’s what a record with “Work Bitch” deserves, I think. What better way to strip shit back and be real than using paparazzi photos of you literally beating the shit out of a vehicle with an umbrella? I dunno. Was the addition of “Jean” supposed to make it more real? Was this a reflection of who Britney was? In 2001 Britney might have depicted a young woman embracing her burgeoning sexuality and the flattening nature of celebrity at the dawn of the new millennium, but Britney Jean came after the frustrating ups and downs following 2007.
I listen to each record over and over as I design the covers, so my thoughts while growing familiar with Britney Jean was that it was strange to have two eponymous albums in your catalog with only a middle name distinction. Going into this project, Britney Jean was the record I was the least familiar with beyond its singles. Pop album covers from the turn of the century are the chintzy, fluffy detritus, an era just now being dusted off and re-cast by contemporary designers looking for new inspiration.Ĭover photo is a photograph shot by paparazzo Daniel Ramos, back photo is a paparazzi photo taken by X17Online. Graphic considerations were made to appeal to a young Millennial audience and, later, to an older voracious American male sexual appetite. Britney was a teenager from a small town in Louisiana who’d been through the Disney star machine known as The Mickey Mouse Club, who did mall tours and whose competition to beat were consumer juggernauts like the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls. Madonna, though, had 15 years of a trailblazing career on the books by 1998 and a start in the New York Art scene of the early 80s. Pop records back when Britney began releasing music twenty years ago didn’t get the kind of treatment they do today, unless the singer had the cultural cache to command a more refined and edgy treatment - say, Madonna’s Ray of Light album cover, released earlier the same year that “…Baby One More Time” was sent out to American radio stations. (Wig, right?) But anyway, late last year around the 10th anniversary of the Living Legend, Original Flop™ Blackout, I noticed that all nearly all nine of Brit’s album covers are, to be blunt, not so pretty (with maybe the exception of Britney Jean, which I kind of adore). Two of us have realized that as much as we slam Witness, we are still talking about Witness, which is probably how Katy wants it. My current favorite flop is Reputation but ARTPOP is my all-timer the other two are ride-and-die Glory lovers. Also we say “man on the moOOOOoooOn” a lot.
We also send around photos of Britney Spears with a pink wig on getting Starbucks, Britney with a pink wig on driving her car, pop star brackets, Japanese commercials featuring pop stars, and memes I find on twitter. We call it “All Shade, No Tea,” and in this group we give ourselves names like “Clumsy,” “Radar,” and “Mood Ring.” We share inane details about our days with each other - who we’re fed up with at work right now, where we’re taking lunch, who needs a drink before the work day is even done. It’s the closest my life has felt to the way it was when I was only 16. Just about every day I drop into a Facebook Messenger group with two of my closest friends.