is this the crappiest album sleeve ever?
well is it?
the picture don’t do it justice.
i’d like to think it is. certainly up there with the best(worst) of them. not that the eighties thrash scene is known for its carefully constructed artistry. storm thorgerson it ain’t. i’m not expecting subtlety but frankly it’s fucking hideous.
the everso madspastic attention to detail is astonishing. note the three cells – one holding freddie krueger, one charlie manson and another one i can’t quite read. it irritates me for some bizarre reason, having a fictional character and a real life (hey i’m not really a) mass murderer incarcerated in the same mental-house. i realise how ridiculous this is of course when the crux of the painting involves a large green mutant with half his head replaced with some tiny industrial complex pushing a screaming doctor strapped to a trolley. but it’s this kind of half-arsedness which stops me buying into its crazy world. without even getting into the ugly clunky typeface.
in an attempt to get to the bottom of this monumentally awful work i contacted the reclusive artist himself. what follows is a full transcript of the brief telephone conversation.
grant: please help me i am in hell!
cows: excuse me… hello? mr grant i’m calling regarding…
grant: hello? hello? there’s marmalade everywhere you bloody fool?
cows: sorry i’m trying to find about razorback.
grant: yes yes i’m a lebowski, you’re a lebowski…
cows: eh?
grant: eh?
cows: razorback, the…
grant: what that russell mulcahy film?
cows: no the painting for the indestructible noise command album back in eighty seven.
grant: ah those long haired chaps.
cows: yes perhaps you could explain…
grant: nurse my medicine please.
cows: perhaps you could explain…
grant: yes yes. it’s all a bit freudian isn’t it.
(silence followed by prolonged hissing of aerosol cans and five minutes of what can only be described as a near-pornographic wet noise)
grant: uuuuuuuuuhng…. well isn’t it?
cows: is it?
grant: it’s all a bit freudian. the hospital corridor represents the road to the unconscious. the monster is of course the preconscious, battling to escape the subconscious, to attain freedom within the conscious life. the cell, containing the killers krueger and manson are symbols of repressed painful memories. the piece in fact refers to freuds three concepts of the conscious.
the descriptive conscious being the theme, the battle deep within the mind, of agents, which the conscious person is very much unaware of.
the dynamic unconscious, to go back to the cells containing the killers, are those ‘things’ which are removed from consciousness as a defensive measure by the self.
and of course the system unconscious or what freud would later rework as the id, ego and superego, the workings of the repressed mental processes, different of course from the conscious processes. here we have the green monster rebelling, the id grown into some ugly brutish child-destroyer.
cows: so it’s not just a monster with a funnel/chimney in his head escaping from a loony bin.
grant: …well in essence, yes. look i was a bay area man so my heart wasn’t really in it…
it’s available to see in full lp sized glory on the wall in where the monkey sleeps. i recommend going and seeking. and have a reubens while yr there…
