Music and Design

How important are album covers? Not just for the purpose of selling albums by attracting the consumer, but also for the message it conveys. The design is crucial and I would like to explore the melody of art and music make when displayed on an album cover. The one album that I would like to explore is Santigold's self titled album.

Santigold is a singer, songwriter, and producer. She has been compared to artists such as Lykke Li and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but likes to think of herself as individually formed and expressed. She loves to detach herself from the typical stereotype of being a black artist and being classified as a hip hop or R&B artist. She is far from that and I believe that she exemplifies that on her self titled album cover. The album cover is a picture of herself in a black and white tone and coming out of her mouth is gold glitter. What does this display exemplify beside the obvious? In my perspective, the use of black and white tone represents the stereotypes and the gold represent the breaking of those stereotypes as well as the "gold" in her name. Everything is either black or white, but people fail to see the gray or gold in between.  Her face expression, the way that her name is written represents individuality. On no other album cover have I seen distinctive characteristics as this one and it is no mistake. This shows how design is very important in the expression of feelings and ideas. Album covers being a prime example.