Album Covers

I’ve only sung karaoke a couple times in my life, but I do sometimes research what songs I might sing should the occasion again present itself.

So, last night, I was watching a Youtube video of the mid-70’s prog-rock group Kansas performing their classic “Carry On My Wayward Son” (you can laugh, but their 1976 concert at the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon was a highlight of that time in my life) and that led me to Wikipedia-ing them and eventually on a little trip down memory lane through other bands of their classically-inspired and arguably pretentious ilk I hadn’t thought of for a while--Camel, Curved Air, Marillion, Gentle Giant, Henry Cow, Van der Graaf Generator—and then into an examination of what Wikipedia had to say about my teenage years’ Big Three: Jethro Tull, Yes, and King Crimson; and it was while poking through their online discographies, and in particular, looking at the cover of the Yes album, “Fragile,” when it occurred to me that given the way music is now delivered to the masses, a key feature of my experience of those bands and albums is no longer typical for fans today.

I’m talking about sitting in your room listening to your brand-new (or well-worn) record while poring over the album cover, reading the liner notes or, in the case of lots of those prog-rock bands, all sorts of artwork, photographs, and oddball writings, exercising your skills in hermeneutics as you tried to find meaning in and make meaning of all the stuff before you.

I’m pretty sure that’s where I got hooked on examining texts and why I ended up becoming an academic, for better or worse.

I can’t imagine how many hours I stared at the Roger Dean paintings on the cover and in the promo booklet (probably fewer than I did looking at the images on King Crimson’s “Lizard,”); but apparently it trained me well for a close-reading of Plato, anyway.