Cover stars, ready to explore the stratosphere.

I love Morrissey’s design sense when he isn’t putting records on his dick. Entirely responsible for the Smiths’ LP and single covers, and still heavily involved now that the world is slicker, he has played violins, hefted guns and babies, burped and lain on railroad tracks for Art. He is also the world champion in pairs publicity shots. There is a poster of him, Marr and some daffodils which still strikes me as dangerous (not because it’s “homoerotic,” whatever that means, but because it’s a professionals’ marriage portrait), and the 2006 image of Kristeen Young displayed on his shoulders in saddle shoes is an lovably queasy evocation of Lolita, let down only by the camera’s catching everyone’s faces at a slightly inopportune moment.

But this post is primarily about those Smiths sleeves -vintage advertisements, film stills and newspaper photographs- and particularly the odd moment that recurs whenever you see something that clearly fits among them – like the image of Wiley Post in an early pressure suit (below), which I found on Boing Boing the other day. The strange business (a camera?) at crotch level, the wrapped and protected body, the caption, the sense that the context has died with the years – it could fit between “Hand In Glove” (Jim French photo of bare-assed fellow) and “This Charming Man” (Jean Marais as a Narcissus-like Orpheus, asleep by a mirroring pond – an image Young briefly glances toward in her gorgeous sleeve for Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).

The Smiths’ visuals were incredibly important in teaching me to recognize the melancholy of low camp. I know that many of them come from “high” sources, but the fact that they mix art films with Seventies soap operas is itself as camp as camp can get. It’s about the sadness of things that lack context; you can find out the source of the still, and quite often the reference is interesting, but the initial strike is all about the total isolation of the image.

Sleeve does what a sleeve should

The album’s hanging on till spring, but the cover is out, and I love it:

It’s a video in one frame. You can read all you’d like into the photo -pin-up coyness, regality, a clogged depression- but it never repeats itself from glance to glance; the classical quietness of the image hushes the heavily armed title, and her gaze meets yours.

And it’s beautiful design. The fonts match well and pick up the lines from the keyboard and sheet, and the touch of ice-blue makes the title rise. The photo layout is perfect, with every vertical and diagonal traveling directly to Young’s face. Her left foot rests firmly on the bottom of the frame; her right trails off into the dark.

And the disc design parodied the Sacajawea dollar.

This is really the first KRISTEENYOUNG sleeve I’ve loved, though The Orphans had an overcrowded, hell-yeah kind of charm which accurately reflects much of the interior.

Previous to that lies the Land of Sleeves Upon Which I Have No Opinion. I’m still trying to grasp Breasticles‘ footlocker theme. But this last one is perfect, looking precisely like the album sounds so far; loaded without being bludgeoning.

The Years of Refusal sleeve

It seems to bother a lot of his fans, but a lot of things do, and I’m not sure I read a big enough sample.

I think its only real offense is a general lack of years – both in the slick facemask he’s been given via Photoshop, and the eye-misleading positioning of the title.

But it seems in keeping with the post-Maladjusted sleeve theme: highly stylized poses, inexplicable props, vintage fonts – all of it not entirely coming off, but it costs you nothing to be generous to the possibility that this sleeve isn’t meant to come off. I think that’s what the past three have aimed for. They’re trying to strike an uncomfortable, does-he-mean-this balance between agonizing high camp and genuine star quality, like “First of the Gang to Die.”

Granted, only Ringleader of the Tormentors, with its implicitly shouted title and slathering of very, very almost-convincing faux-very-high-class-indeed patina, actually got there for me:

Say what you want. I think that’s a beautiful goddamn piece of design.

But Years of Refusal isn’t bad either, despite the Photoshop and a certain weirdness around the proportions and cropping which I assume is not part of the point. I like the blankness of what’s left of Morrissey’s expression, and the way it contrasts with the extremely personable baby.

Look at that baby. That’s a sassy baby. I think he’s saying, “you should get to know your town, just like I know mine.”