Amoeba Music

Anton Corbijn’s documentary, recommended by a co-worker, is a must-see for classic rock fans and anyone who is remotely connected to creating art/graphics. It really reminded me about the radical ways graphics have changed in the last 50 or so years. It tells a part of the story of the design collaboration behind some of the most iconic rock LP covers in the genre. The Hipgnosis Design Studio was helmed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, who are responsible for creating the aesthetic of a generation. Starting their career with Pink Floyd, they went on to produce album covers for a who’s who of classic rock, such as Led Zeppelin and Wings, to name a few. You’ll be surprised. I found myself again and again recognizing an album cover and thinking, “shit-they did that too?”. Corbijn interviews the musicians that worked with Hipgnosis while using Po as the story’s anchor. Although it is focused on anecdotes about this or that cover that are wry and light hearted, the viewer is left sensing a melancholy under it all as Po’s regrets emerge. But the larger story is how these men created images that still signify the zeitgeist of an era. Today CGI and other technology allows the production of almost anything that can be imagined. That certainly was not the case in the 60’s and 70’s. The creative thinking and energy behind making imagination into a different type of reality was massive. There were no images to manipulate or cut and paste. Hipgnosis blazed a cultural trail whose impact is hard to overstate. The documentary does an amazing job of honoring that. Many viewers will remember the album art that Hipgnosis brought forth as the covers they looked at lying on their bed, listening to the album over and over again. The time when getting a new release from a band involved going to the record store, getting the album, and coming home or to a friend’s house and dropping the needle on it for the first time while staring at the sleeve and/or insert and reading the liner notes, lyrics, or just gazing at the cover while listening. Each image became the repository of literally millions of listening memories that are now inseparable from the music itself, giving those audible memories a visual place to live. Hipgnosis carved a new space into graphics whose work was seminal in conveying the ethos of the music and musicians of their time.

This book is a long conversation between the author and the musician that took place between 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. It is an intimate look into Cave’s personal beliefs and how they factor into the things he creates. About how those beliefs and practices have helped him to first survive, and then live with the loss of his son Arthur. Readers of Cave’s “The Red Hand Files” will already have a sense of what guides him, but this book is a deeper exploration that I found both moving and affirming. Cave is refreshingly unabashed and frank. In his unique authenticity, he speaks to the universal and articulates conundrums that many of us wonder about regarding what God is or signifies, the creative process, and most importantly how to keep existing when something that is unbearable happens. Those events that fracture us and mark transitions into “before” and “after.” Something that sears away your previous frames of reference and leave you staring into an abyss. That are so brutal that some people cannot survive them psychically and are dragged down. Mr. Cave talks about his journey through agony and points to the things that were illuminated as a result. This book is fascinating, heartbreaking, and unapologetically vulnerable and I respect it deeply and appreciate its existence. It speaks to the ways that the creative process demands humility and courage. We are all artists to the extent that we all create our lives. I believe that the more we can open ourselves up to ambiguity, become curious about our fears, and trust in synchronicity, the more we can connect to way of living that allows us to realize more of our whole self. As Cave points out, “[T]he creative process is not a part of one’s life but life itself and all that it throws at you”(p.109). Here it is words that flesh out one man’s music in the shape of an intimate dialogue that allows us to share and expand our experience of his art. And for me, it reaffirms the idea that the distinction between art and life is a false one and that any way that we can choose our actions “artistically” is a way that we can connect to ourselves in a more profound way. In “Having an Experience”, John Dewey writes the following about aesthetic expression: "As we manipulate, we touch and feel, as we look, we see; as we listen, we hear. The hand moves with etching needle or with brush. The eye attends and reports the consequence of what is done. Because of this intimate connection, subsequent doing is cumulative and not a matter of caprice nor yet of routine. In an emphatic artistic-aesthetic experience, the relation is so close that it controls simultaneously both the doing and the perception. Such vital intimacy of connection cannot be had if only hand and eye are engaged. When they do not, both of them, act as organs of the whole being, there is but a mechanical sequence of sense and movement, as in walking that is automatic. Hand and eye, when the experience is aesthetic, are but instruments through which the entire live creature, moved and active throughout, operates. Hence the expression is emotional and guided by purpose." I want to be an entire live creature in any way that I can. Reading and learning about how artists work reminds me to not let myself become invisible in the repetition of the familiar, to try my best to stay present and actively choose using my heart as my guide. I’m so lucky to be in a world where I come across all kinds of beauty that calls me to reach for that.