Like Tinder for desperate people: Unsettlingly bad Europop record covers

01.23.2018
10:06 am
Topics:
Amusing
Design
Music
Tags:
records
album covers

I have a pet theory (I call him Malcolm, he likes having his tummy rubbed) that posits the suggestion that maybe vinyl declined all those years ago because there were so many shit covers around. It is possible. Too many shit covers meant people didn’t want their lack of taste in music to be seen by their cool friends, so sales dropped until downloads arrived when nobody knows what shit you’re listening to on your iPod.

I mean, we all have guilty secrets about music, you know, bands we’re not supposed to like but we always seem to find there’s just that one track that awful band did way back when that always hits the spot when we’re feeling all mushy inside or very, very drunk or just loved up on way too many eccies or even possibly having no fucking taste in music whatsoever. You know the kind of thing. If you don’t, well you haven’t been paying attention.

Having a sneaky little taste for something outré or déclassé or just fucking shit meant, back then at least, having to buy the goddam vinyl (there were no downloads then, kids, see above). This meant you would always have the unfortunate evidence of your guilty little pleasure on display for every fuckwit who browsed through your record collection and never let you live it down.

Which, by long way of a preamble, brings me to this fucking collection of shit covers from the 1970s and 1980s that were (somehow) available in Europe, well, primarily Holland, to be fair. Some of these covers look like the profile pics for would-be serial killers on Tinder. These are obviously the kind of covers made by foolhardy record execs who say things like “Who needs a designer, my son’s gotta camera, he can do it….” And you know what, he did.

H/T Flashbak and Vintage Everyday.