Design from an island just beyond Babylon

[imomus]

I'm lucky to live near one of Berlin's most famous specialist record shops, Hard Wax in Kreuzberg. Up five flights of stairs at the back of a second courtyard, Hard Wax feels more like an esoteric supply source for DJs than a commercial record outlet. I'm not, to be honest, terribly interested in the club music they sell there, but I love to pop in to look at the reggae sleeves. It's all on vinyl, much of it is vintage, and the sleeves are simply fabulous.

You know me by now. I'm interested in exquisite, principled cultural otherness, whether that's located in kabuki theatre, the architecture of Rudolf Steiner, or Nyahbhinghi reggae. I'm interested in ways of being in the world which are radically different from the ways I know. These sleeves have that kind of strangeness in spades. They're full of eccentricity and charm, of the warmth, colour and vigour of Jamaica, of the feel of the 1970s, of spiritual values, of struggle and rebellion, and of reggae's doped-up, positive and peaceful vibes. The sleeves I picked to show you were mostly made between about 1970 and 1982 -- reggae's heyday.

There are lots of awful reggae sleeves too, of course. Horrible, horrible compilations, appalling uses of red, green and gold, drop-shadow brush script, crappy copies of gansta rap poses. Since selling out to Babylon is a very central concept to Rastafarians, it's interesting that reggae artists whose complete catalogues I looked at seemed to start releasing eye-hurting sleeves when Babylonian stuff started happening in their careers:

a) they moved from Jamaica to the US.
b) they signed to a major label.
c) they employed the services of a professional designer, or used a computer.
d) 1983 arrived, or any date subsequent.
e) cd replaced vinyl.

When I shared the delights of these sleeves with Hisae, she started telling me about an outsider artist, a 56 year-old black man from Washington DC who's been making his own sleeves, for imaginary soul records featuring himself, since the late 60s. Mingering Mike has "released" 52 albums and 20 singles. There's no music, just these hand-painted covers made of construction paper from the drugstore. The records are cardboard, painted with grooves.

Below you can see a couple of his sleeves, taken from his website. For me, they have quite a similar quality to the vintage reggae sleeves. And although they're homemade parodies of an entirely commercial form, Babylon seems to have had surprisingly little say in their design.

Comments

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Mingering Mike. Its been so long since I last saw that stuff. Thanks for the link. Thanks Hisae!

BTW I had a dream last night that you were adamant that you worked with Link Wray on his spectacular sessions for WRAY'S THREE TRACK SHACK

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Not Link Wray, Eek-a-Mouse!

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[niyabinghi.livejournal.com]

Nice selection -- you wouldn't have happened to notice how much the Mikey Dread Dread at the Controls was going for, would you?

True about the LP art of that era -- the Creation Rockers series is great, early Augustus Pablo and Lee Scratch Perry. One of my favorites is Dr. Alimontados' "Best Dressed Chicken in Town", with a pic of him staggering up a road shirtless with his fly open.

The eras' considered a very rich roots era -- but reggaes' far from dead. :)

[senators.livejournal.com]

i was browsing a bookstore some months ago and found his book. i got it with the intention of giving it to my brother for his birthday. i really loved it and i felt it quite hard to let go.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, they didn't necessarily have all the ones I've illustrated here. I took notes, then expanded the selection when I got home. Hard Wax's reggae selections are online here (http://hardwax.com/section/reggae/)... 81 pages of them!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, I bought Mikey Dread's "World War III" when it first came out! It's the only record of his I have. "African Anthem" sounds pretty good (http://hardwax.com/audio/06/06842/06842_A1.mp3), though.

[(Anonymous)]

That version of "Dread at the Controls" is actually a reissue - saw a copy yesterday at Jammyland here in NYC for about $15. You should be able to get that record quite inexpensively now - and rather easily, too!

Lee Perry's "Judgement Inna Babylon" sleeve is one of my faves, with Chris Blackwell as Dracula holding a chalice of chiken's blood in his hand, his face obscured by his vampire cape as Perry stands next to him, frightened, with his hair standing straight up and his headphones flying off of his head.

-Mikey IQ.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

M. Mike is something else.

There's a fellow out there by the name of Blake who does collaged faux-album covers, but he puts mot of his energies writing the liner notes on the back, describing in great detail the album he hears in his head, going so far as to provide a biographical background, etc. Each album is a small book. Was thumbing through a few of them last week--a friend collects them.

[(Anonymous)]

Whimsy, the true arbiter of quality outsider records!

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

yeah, the late seventies sleeves are lovely. i love buying reggae, but the sleeves of reissues are often quite terrible! my favourite are the black and white sleeves of the Wackies label (reissued via the minimal techno aesthetics of the Basic Channel guys). mid nineties Blood & Fire covers are horrible, faux joseph cornell box kinda things - they are a bit better nowadays along with Pressure Sounds. But the Soul Jazz ones really turn me off...

i realise this comment should really have links to pictures.

Codek Records

[(Anonymous)]

those pre-computer times had their own quality in cover design!

some of these reggae covers remind me of the work of designer / label-owner Alex Gloor whose sleeves for his Codek label are among my favorite covers of all time.

see some of this records here:
http://www.codek.com/vinyl.html

eRiC

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A couple of wider points. Obviously this post relates to the one before, because these sleeves could be seen (unproblematically, to most people) as expressions of the "Jamaican folk soul".

The other point is that there's a bit of a sensibility clash between this post -- in which I proclaim myself uninterested in the club records at Hard Wax -- and the current article on Pingmag (http://pingmag.jp/2007/08/20/richie-hawtin-about-minimal-art/), which celebrates Richie Hawtin's minimalist sleeves. These icy, simple designs couldn't be further from the warm reggae clutter I'm celebrating here. One of them looks very much like the Deutsche Bank logo (http://upload.moldova.org/economie/2006/aug/Deutsche-Bank-logo.jpg) -- how much more Babylonian can you get than that?

Hawtin represents a side of Berlin I'm left completely cold by: "minimal house bobbins". I'm interested to see that many Pingmag readers agree: the comments under the Hawtin piece are uncharacteristically negative.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That could be extended: if one weren't allowed to talk about "the Jamaican folk soul", one wouldn't really have a language in which to talk about why reggae sleeves got really horrible when they got "Babylonian".

In other words, no ideology of "folk soul" = no language for why Babylonian damnation might not be good for you. So you might want to suspect that the very people who condemn talk of "folk soul" are the people who don't want any resistance to Babylon formulated.

[betrayyrfriends.livejournal.com]

this is a bit disgusting but how is mingering to be pronounced? like MING GER RING? or in a scottish manner, reffering to a piercing?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Further thought: It is those who don't want to identify their own beliefs as ideology who most resist language outlining coherent ideological systems of others ("folk soul" being just one of the lassos you can throw around those systems).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd rhyme it with "lingering". Mike doesn't speak Scots dialect, so he doesn't have to worry about the close proximity of words like "minging" (which, for non-Scots reading, means "stinky").

[steviecat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for showing these. Such beautiful design. The Mingering Mike book is a real treat too (Princeton Architectural Press).

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, what was the last novel you read (and finished)? What did you think of it?

[(Anonymous)]

Gavin Brown in New York had a Pedro Bell exhibition a few years ago. He is the artist who drew so many of the Parliament/Funkadelic/George Clinton album covers, which I can easily imagine as an inspiration for some of Mingering Mike's work. Anyway, in the show were a number of covers (square 3 x 3' canvases) for faux musical acts as well. If you think the cover of Cosmic Slop is "licentious," you should see those!

maybe un-noticed

[(Anonymous)]

maybe you didn't notice but that last swingers party I met you at, just after you skwafed down some ooloncha tea , I told everyone else at the part I had wee'd in it before hand, but you said it was delicious cos it was served to you by a Vietnamese girl...

FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAAAAH

AH - FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAAAAH

FWAHFWAHFWAHFWAAAAH

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

I loved this guy's take on "cutting edge architecture" (such as minimal house bobbins):

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200611.html

Re: maybe un-noticed

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nurse, put Kovacs back into the straitjacket, please.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Woof! (http://www.amazon.com/Curious-Incident-Dog-Night-time/dp/0099456761) (Wags tail.)

Re: Codek Records

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

come on, reggae is so plate these days

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the people in Montreal with the Canadian flags on their backpack - "it's just one happy family here!"

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

did you see his talk from the TED conference

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

No, how was it? What was it?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Here's a poster (for the German Symphony Orchestra) I saw today on the subway. "Get inside the German soul," it says.

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

there is some youtube clone website with a video of him rambling about urbanism. it´s nothing really new but i found it amusing, and that´s how i discovered his website

[(Anonymous)]

Which is a joke you didn't get.

der.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The joke for me is that you're now going to have to shoot the whole orchestra.

[(Anonymous)]

It's second rate anyway.

This isn't exactly `political discourse', though.

der.

[(Anonymous)]

No, we simply want answers to questions such as those below, just as we wanted to explode any idiocy we were pumped at school:

"Why does folk soul begin and end at national borders?"
or
"Why does fold soul begin and end at skin tones?"
or
"Why does folks soul begin and end at faciality?"

Why, eventually, does 'folk soul' sound like an episode of It's A Knockout?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Peripherus_Max (http://peripherus-max.livejournal.com/2007/08/18/) has a similar take.

There's too many intelligent, educated, progressively-minded people who dislike such forms of brutalism; not all of them can be conveniently dismissed as "ignorant" or "reactionary".

This entry (http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200605.html) was rather good. So was this. (http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200608.html)

Novelty is not enough.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200706.html

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200707.html

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200603.html

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200601.html

http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200512.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, think of reggae, since we're thinking about reggae today. Nobody seriously denies that it began in the nation of Jamaica, was created by black artists and producers, and loses power the further you take it from its roots. Or do you think Sting is the quintessential reggae artist?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

And finally:
http://kunstler.com/eyesore_200304.html

Well,

[bugpowered.livejournal.com]

Well, my friend, the answer to all of these questions is that soul (folk soul or any other kind) is not an abstract thing existing in the intellectual isolation of our minds. It develops inside a vessel, be it a host body, a nation, etc...

So, let's replay one of those:

"Why does folk soul begin and end at national borders?"

Well, if the national borders have developed *historically* (with the workings and the patina of centuries) and not artificially, it's because the folks whose interacted created such a soul have been constrained in said borders.

In colonial Africa, where borders were drawn artificially on a map by imperialist powers, the national borders do not enclose any folk soul. Borders created historically enclose more of the folk soul. It's also a feedback loop: the existence of borders amplifies the national ties between the inhabitants.

Of course, as with all things where humans and culture are involved, it's not an exact science. This does not mean it does not exist, though.