Anna Burdsal
Samantha Mudd
English 151
20 May 2010
Mushroom Cloud of a Generation
Music has often been described as a combination of both thought and feeling. When one listens to music, it is nearly a transcendental experience; we are mentally transported to a world that we create. However, the record label infiltrates the listeners’ creative thinking. After an artist is signed, everything becomes centralized on an image that they want to perpetuate. This image can exist anywhere in an album, including the music, which creates an image with the sense of sound. Furthermore, the band members themselves create their image by dressing a certain way in co ordinance with the target audience. In essence, the recording industry manipulates our mental interpretation of the music by replacing the listeners’ imagery with their own. By donning the band with a certain image, hand-picking cover artwork, and mixing tracks based on a particular theme, they create a holistic image of how they want the perception of the band to be received. When considering all of these aspects, an album is captivating advertisement that targets the listeners through a sense of pop culture. The youth is most effected by the record label. Record labels try to seek the youth market by making the band relatable to pop culture. This is true with the album Crown of Creation.
Crown of Creation is an album by the band, Jefferson Airplane. This band was a notorious name in conjunction with the 1960s decade. Released in 1968 as the band’s fourth album, Crown of Creation creates a surrealistic image of Jefferson Airplane. Jefferson Airplane, as an image as well as a band, was a source of identity for a generation that longed for change. This generation of ‘Baby Boomers,’ sought to bring about change by influencing our society with their music, art, and other forms of expression in order to challenge intellectual thought. This album in particular, is brimming with the influences of the ‘Baby Boom’ generation. Everything from the band cover of the album to title of the tracks is an image representation of the 1960s and its ‘Baby Boomers.’
The album cover from Crown of Creation, is a symbol, exemplifying a generation born under the terrifying prospect of ‘nuclear war.’ On this album cover, a massive, mushroom-looking cloud rises up into the sky. The tremendous cloud is composed of an array of colors. With the outside maroon, the cloud radiates colors red, yellow, and white smoke. Inside of the mushroom cloud, are the distorted images of the band members, which are depicted inside of the radiating colors of smoke. Their bodies look as if they are sprouting from littler mushroom smoke clouds of grey with stems of pinkish hue. At the bottom of the massive mushroom cloud, are letters which are slanted, green, and ablaze. The fiery green letters, make up the words which entitle the image, Crown of Creation.
As with every album, Crown of Creation presents an underlying image for the band. The whole purpose of the image is to market the band to a target group of pop culture consumers. With Crown of Creation, the band members present an image to the public eye; the songs are picked to garner interest from a particular audience (the Baby Boomers), and the album cover melds all of the artistic imagery together into one. The cover is the ultimate representation of what you can expect from the band. To our present generation, Crown of Creation might seem like its album cover does not have any sort of relevance, but this cover is the ultimate image of a generation of peace, war, love, sex, drugs, and mind experimentation.
Crown of Creation demonstrates how an album cover is creative marketing that coalesces the artist with their art and theme. Today, however, there is less creative marketing strategy present with album covers. A current issue worth mentioning is that of creativity in conjunction with our technological culture; the creativity of an album is rapidly deteriorating as technology becomes increasingly prevalent. In addition, it seems as if today’s music artists have lost their ability both to produce a deeper meaning in their work, and formulate new, innovative ways in which to express themselves creatively. Improvisation, largely a part of creative expression, is almost non-existent today. This is especially true since we are a culture centralized on convenience. Consequently, songs are shorter and simpler, and album art has less identity with the music.
The album Manners, by the modern band Passion Pitt, is an example of album artwork that has lost its identity with its musical theme. Manners has a simple, electronic, pulsing sound, that easily catches the attention of the listener. This catchy type of music is a result of the consumer’s demand that music be convenient. Manners can be easily advertised, bought, and sold from iTunes. Because music is so conveniently obtained through technology, there is less of a need for creative album artwork. Today, album artwork must be simple, so that it is easily identified on the screen of an iPod. Today, technology has taken away the creativity from album artwork.
In the 1960s, album artwork had to be creative in order to establish itself with the culture of its audience. In 1968, the year that Crown of Creation debuted, America was in the midst of a draft. Many people, were frightened at the aspect of nuclear war due to the new innovations in weaponry. There was a prominent ‘hippy’ culture in this generation of ‘Baby Boomers’ that believed in love instead of war. Jefferson Airplane was a band that easily identified itself with the ‘hippy’ culture by the album artwork that they produced.
With the artwork, the band easily identified itself with the generation of ‘Baby Boomers’ because within their artwork, they depicted images of tumultuous decade. By incorporating elements of their generation they established a sense of identity with their music. By using the mushroom cloud of nuclear devastation, they demonstrated that they were representatives of a generation that were frightened by the concept of nuclear war.
There are other aspects to this album cover that also establish the band as leaders of their culture. The youth of the ’Baby Boom’ generation was involved in drug experimentation to discover new ways of perceiving the world and society. There are allusions to this cultural habit of the time, which are depicted in the distorted images of the band members of Jefferson Airplane. The distorted images appear to form littler clouds of mushrooms. Mushrooms, also known as ‘shrooms, were a typical drug of the generation. These psychedelic mushrooms created distorted images and hallucinations for the person who ate them. This generation was one that believed in partaking of these hallucinogenic substances for enlightenment. Jefferson Airplane was notorious for partaking in these mind-altering drugs.
Out of this decade of mushroom clouds and mind experimentation, sprung a unique youth. The youth of the 1960s were very different than the youth of the 1950s. Due to the tumultuous events of the time, and the newly gained perspective brought on by mind-altering drugs, the youth of the 1960s were the most outspoken group of individuals that the world has ever seen. This generation of youth experienced a tumultuous time, but out of it sprung change. The youth of the 1960s expressed these tumultuous events of the time in their art, and they changed the world in which they lived by the art that they created. Because of the new ways in which people were thinking, a lot of positive reforms came about during this decade. Women were given more freedom in the way that they dressed, blacks were treated more fairly, and art was built upon less constraints. Bands like Jefferson Airplane helped to bring about these positive changes by consistently expressing their outlandish ways creatively within the public eye.
Jefferson Airplane appealed to the youth of that time because they constantly shocked the public into accepting the youth's changing ideals. Logically, people identify with people that are like themselves. For that specific reason, Jefferson Airplane is one of the most influential bands to the ‘Baby Boom’ generation. Everything about their image represented a youth unlike any other. With the image of Jefferson Airplane, a record label sought to make a profit. However, because of the era in which the band expressed itself, the band was more than a profit. Jefferson Airplane, as well as their album Crown of Creation, produced a deeper meaning of their music than the artists produced of today. This band along with its album, Crown of Creation, will eventuall be forgotten given the lapse time. Due to that fact, it is safe to say that Crown of Creation is a relic of the past that is worth preserving. Music, and the way that it is presented in terms of an album, is changing as time progresses. The changes of the future will eventually allow artistic expression to die-out. One of these days, music will only be produced in its simpler, less creative form.
