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Stir It Up: Reggae Album Cover Art
Before the advent of music videos and CDs, album covers offered international audiences a colorful invitation to the exotic world of Jamaican reggae, ska, and rock steady.
Stir It Up
collects both rare and classic examples of this popular cover art, from the earliest ska recordings through the dance hall craze of the '80s. Including such musical legends as the Wailers (featuring a pre-dread Bob Marley), Mighty Diamonds, Steel Pulse, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Yellowman, these album covers provide a vivid glimpse into the fashions, politics, and religious currents that have shaped reggae music.
While these covers often reflect serious preoccupations with Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, and nuclear apocalypse, reggae's lighter side comes through in pictorial tributes to American Westerns, steamy dances and smoke-wreathed spliffs. Anecdotes and stories from album cover artists and designers reveal secrets behind the mysterious fingerprints masquerading as Peter Tosh's on Wanted: Dread or Alive, plus other fascinating facts about some of reggae's best-loved covers.
An amazing visual journey through reggae history, Stir It Up is a must-have book for every fan of reggae music and style. Take a big hit and pass it on.
While these covers often reflect serious preoccupations with Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, and nuclear apocalypse, reggae's lighter side comes through in pictorial tributes to American Westerns, steamy dances and smoke-wreathed spliffs. Anecdotes and stories from album cover artists and designers reveal secrets behind the mysterious fingerprints masquerading as Peter Tosh's on Wanted: Dread or Alive, plus other fascinating facts about some of reggae's best-loved covers.
An amazing visual journey through reggae history, Stir It Up is a must-have book for every fan of reggae music and style. Take a big hit and pass it on.
120 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1999
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 13, 2011
LIVELY UP YOURSELF - A COMPRESSED HISTORY OF JAMAICAN MUSIC IN ONE ABSURD SENTENCE
Before the late 50s Jamaican music was all feeble copies of New Orleans “sophisticated” r&b but then import records got too expensive and local musicians began making records and missing beats and bending rhythms and combining folkroots threads like pocomania and mento so it all morphed into bluebeat which then got faster and became ska which got everyone too hot, those Jamaican summers are fierce, so rock steady cooled out a little, you got to play it slow so you can dance all night, then it was reggae in your jeggae and hasn’t stopped since except to extrude curious tendrils from the main stem like lover’s rock (don’t bother with that), such skanky rude boy slackness as dancehall, (not much to see there neither) and crucial experiments such as dub - well, we all have to have some dub before breakfast, it is an acknowledged fact - and toasting - no, not with bread, with deejays rapping over a version which was the same as the A side only sans vocals, gave the deejays some time on the mike and you didn’t have to pay the musicians for another tune, win win you know, so that idea was exported to Brooklyn New York and the whole rap thing grew out of it back in the late 70s early 80s like Jack’s famous beanstalk and took over the entire universe, as we all know.
WE'VE COME TO OVERSTAND - LIFE AND DEATH OF ALBUM ART
The record sleeve, ah, the record sleeve – it rose in the 50s and fell in the 90s, 40 years of sometimes beautiful and sometimes disgraceful iconography. I wish it were still here, you can’t meditate over a beermat cd sleeve but you can stare at the cover of The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers of the Onion until the sheer mystic power of it starts to tie up all the loose threads in the entire known universe. I stick my favourite lp covers on the wall. It’s art. This book Stir It Up does a good job of showing me that only the following ten things have ever been pictured on a reggae album sleeve :
1) King Haile Selassie, Jah Rastafari, King of Kings, Prince of Princes and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah – sometimes shown as a very small child, mostly as a wise spiritual presence
2) Rastamen with their locks and thousand yard stares, not too much smiling going on
[image error]
2) Massive spliffs and chalices, most often with various persons disappearing in clouds of heavy smoke enough to put most people into the intensive care unit but not these guys, they thrive on it
3) Ganja in its various manifestations, fields of it, patterns made of it, dreadlocks plaited from it, spaceships fuelled by it, Christmas trees made from it, etc
4) Africa shown as One Nation, as not free, as the Original Home – out of Africa comes the Congo man, Africa as an aspirational retirement plan, Africa as the rasta version of Oz
5) Marcus Garvey with his Black Star Liners
[image error]
6) Ghetto life and how no chains are around my feet but I’m not free for I am bound here in captivity here in Babylon
7) Very crude political agitprop such as the anti-World war Three vogue of the 80s and general complaints about fascist police, etc
8) musicians dressed up as characters from spaghetti westerns (these musicians sometimes go one step further and call themselves names like Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cliff)
9) The worlds crappest cartoons, depicting any or all of the above (because a crap cartoon is cheaper than a photo, less colours involved in the printing)
10) Very rarely, a picture of the actual musicians playing the actual music – in fact, anything but that!
Before the late 50s Jamaican music was all feeble copies of New Orleans “sophisticated” r&b but then import records got too expensive and local musicians began making records and missing beats and bending rhythms and combining folkroots threads like pocomania and mento so it all morphed into bluebeat which then got faster and became ska which got everyone too hot, those Jamaican summers are fierce, so rock steady cooled out a little, you got to play it slow so you can dance all night, then it was reggae in your jeggae and hasn’t stopped since except to extrude curious tendrils from the main stem like lover’s rock (don’t bother with that), such skanky rude boy slackness as dancehall, (not much to see there neither) and crucial experiments such as dub - well, we all have to have some dub before breakfast, it is an acknowledged fact - and toasting - no, not with bread, with deejays rapping over a version which was the same as the A side only sans vocals, gave the deejays some time on the mike and you didn’t have to pay the musicians for another tune, win win you know, so that idea was exported to Brooklyn New York and the whole rap thing grew out of it back in the late 70s early 80s like Jack’s famous beanstalk and took over the entire universe, as we all know.
WE'VE COME TO OVERSTAND - LIFE AND DEATH OF ALBUM ART
The record sleeve, ah, the record sleeve – it rose in the 50s and fell in the 90s, 40 years of sometimes beautiful and sometimes disgraceful iconography. I wish it were still here, you can’t meditate over a beermat cd sleeve but you can stare at the cover of The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers of the Onion until the sheer mystic power of it starts to tie up all the loose threads in the entire known universe. I stick my favourite lp covers on the wall. It’s art. This book Stir It Up does a good job of showing me that only the following ten things have ever been pictured on a reggae album sleeve :
1) King Haile Selassie, Jah Rastafari, King of Kings, Prince of Princes and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah – sometimes shown as a very small child, mostly as a wise spiritual presence
2) Rastamen with their locks and thousand yard stares, not too much smiling going on
[image error]
2) Massive spliffs and chalices, most often with various persons disappearing in clouds of heavy smoke enough to put most people into the intensive care unit but not these guys, they thrive on it
3) Ganja in its various manifestations, fields of it, patterns made of it, dreadlocks plaited from it, spaceships fuelled by it, Christmas trees made from it, etc
4) Africa shown as One Nation, as not free, as the Original Home – out of Africa comes the Congo man, Africa as an aspirational retirement plan, Africa as the rasta version of Oz
5) Marcus Garvey with his Black Star Liners
[image error]
6) Ghetto life and how no chains are around my feet but I’m not free for I am bound here in captivity here in Babylon
7) Very crude political agitprop such as the anti-World war Three vogue of the 80s and general complaints about fascist police, etc
8) musicians dressed up as characters from spaghetti westerns (these musicians sometimes go one step further and call themselves names like Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cliff)
9) The worlds crappest cartoons, depicting any or all of the above (because a crap cartoon is cheaper than a photo, less colours involved in the printing)
10) Very rarely, a picture of the actual musicians playing the actual music – in fact, anything but that!
Displaying 1 of 1 review