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On Monday, Billboard launched its record of the best album covers of all time, and the winner was not Robert Mapplethorpe (the photographer behind a famed Patti Smith document), Peter Blake (who, along with his spouse Jann Haworth, did an iconic picture for the Beatles), and even George Apartment (whose work turned synonymous with Kanye West for a bit), however Andy Warhol, who took the highest honors for the 1967 album The Velvet Underground and Nico.
To these with a passing data of rock music, this looks as if an uncontroversial alternative. However on social media this week, the Billboard record turned the topic of debate after some customers requested variations on a query that brought on others to cringe: A banana, actually?
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It might be arduous to recall a time when The Velvet Underground and Nico was unpopular, however the truth is there was one, and it was 1967, the 12 months it got here out. Whereas the document is now thought-about a towering achievement—its aggressive sounds and subversive lyrics now seen as precursors to so many sonic traits afterward—The Velvet Underground and Nico didn’t discover a mass viewers on the time.
Behind the scenes, Warhol was influential within the creation of the album. Serving because the band’s supervisor, Warhol was the one who linked up The Velvet Underground with Nico. The musicians ended up collaborating in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances. But even Warhol’s involvement did little to spice up the band’s industrial prospects.
Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik has reported that The Velvet Underground and Nico solely made it #171 on the Billboard 200 charts and that, between 1967 and 1969, its gross sales accounted for simply $22,000 in royalties. The Pop artist’s administration firm, Warvel, took a one-fifth minimize from that—a meager sum, even when inflation is considered. (In 1982, producer Brian Eno claimed that the album solely bought round 30,000 copies in its first 5 years.)
The music on the album was thought-about improper—its lyrics take up doing medicine and S&M, amongst different actions—and so many radio stations declined to play it. That’s one purpose the album didn’t fare nicely on the time. However one other could also be its album cowl, a Pop picture whose double entendre is laid on thickly.
Andy Warhol’s cowl for The Velvet Underground and Nico, as seen in a 2016 exhibition concerning the band held in Paris.
Picture Eric Feferberg/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
JPEGs of the quilt for The Velvet Underground and Nico conceal the truth that Warhol designed the album cowl in order that it had an interactive aspect. The banana’s vinyl pores and skin may pulled away, providing a view of a pink fruit beneath it. “Peel slowly and see,” some unsubtle textual content on the quilt reads. Gopnik has in contrast all this to peeling again a foreskin and written that the jacket “aligned the Velvets with the hard-edged queer tradition that the Manufacturing unit was coming to symbolize.”
Or, to place it one other manner, right here’s what Lou Reed, the band’s frontman, had this to say concerning the album: “The banana truly made it into an erotic artwork present.”
In reality, it wasn’t the one erotic artwork present that Warhol created for a musician. One other was produced in 1969 for the Rolling Stones, whose 1971 album Sticky Fingers includes a close-up of a person’s torso clad in denim, his left bulge plainly seen. That album cowl featured a zipper that could possibly be pulled right down to reveal underwear beneath. Later reissues of the document nixed the zipper, so that every one that was left was Warhol’s image.
The reception for Sticky Fingers was a lot completely different. Warhol, together with the designer Craig Braun, acquired a Grammy nomination for it. Sticky Fingers additionally appeared on the Billboard 200 record—greater than 20 spots behind The Velvet Underground and Nico.
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