I know this is late, but I posted to the wrong part of the blog last week and had trouble uploading my pic. This is a copy of my post, with image intact (yay!). Before my trouble posting, I had hard time choosing an image to post. I was debating between several different artists I like, but Larkin's post kind of cracked me up. It reminded me of the Iron Maiden album Powerslave, with all the Egyptian iconography. For this assignment, I ended up going with Number of the Beast, which I like a little better than Powerslave, both visually and rhetorically.
I am currently reading Jeff Chang's 2005 book on the history of hip-hop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, for an art history class on the impact of hip-hop culture on contemporary art. Chang talks about the interplay of graffiti, fashion, dance, film, and music creating a rich, multisensory, public image of hip-hop culture. This gave me a conceptual framework for thinking about the visual rhetoric of 80s heavy metal in general and Iron Maiden in particular.
I mainly like the Number of the Beast cover because it’s like the ultimate “fuck you” to suburban parents and the entire White, middle-class, conformist, Christian establishment. Eddie, the skeletal demon and Maiden mascot, towers over Satan in a stance that both threatens (parents and other conservatives) and beckons (teenaged metal-heads). But then, have any of you listened to this album (or any classic Iron Maiden) recently? I was in Decent Pizza a few weeks ago and heard the entire Piece of Mind album by Iron Maiden and was really surprised at how tame, and even pretty, it sounded. The music is melodic and sophisticated, and the lyrics are literary and smart. The music it isn’t even remotely as scary as Maiden’s album covers would have us believe. So my questions about the Number of the Beast album cover are: Does the disparity between the aesthetics of the music and the image of the band conveyed by the album cover result from my contemporary listening context (25 years later)? Or did it always exist to a certain extent? If the latter (which to me seems more interesting to think about) what does that say about the 80s metal fan and about Iron Maiden?
I am currently reading Jeff Chang's 2005 book on the history of hip-hop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, for an art history class on the impact of hip-hop culture on contemporary art. Chang talks about the interplay of graffiti, fashion, dance, film, and music creating a rich, multisensory, public image of hip-hop culture. This gave me a conceptual framework for thinking about the visual rhetoric of 80s heavy metal in general and Iron Maiden in particular.
I mainly like the Number of the Beast cover because it’s like the ultimate “fuck you” to suburban parents and the entire White, middle-class, conformist, Christian establishment. Eddie, the skeletal demon and Maiden mascot, towers over Satan in a stance that both threatens (parents and other conservatives) and beckons (teenaged metal-heads). But then, have any of you listened to this album (or any classic Iron Maiden) recently? I was in Decent Pizza a few weeks ago and heard the entire Piece of Mind album by Iron Maiden and was really surprised at how tame, and even pretty, it sounded. The music is melodic and sophisticated, and the lyrics are literary and smart. The music it isn’t even remotely as scary as Maiden’s album covers would have us believe. So my questions about the Number of the Beast album cover are: Does the disparity between the aesthetics of the music and the image of the band conveyed by the album cover result from my contemporary listening context (25 years later)? Or did it always exist to a certain extent? If the latter (which to me seems more interesting to think about) what does that say about the 80s metal fan and about Iron Maiden?
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