Why musicians such as Pink and Quavo love ropey cover portraits
It’s the golden age of the rubbish self-portrait as album art, inflicting all corners of the music world
Pink’s new album, Hurts 2B Human, has quite the album artwork – a multicoloured painting of the pop star gazing into the distance, either thinking philosophical thoughts or just congratulating herself on saving two whole letters on the album cover by using text speak from the early 00s. The result is very GCSE art final coursework but, fair play to her, after seven album-cover photoshoots, she’s probably running out of ideas.
Pink is not the first pop star to put an arty twist on an album cover – a little-known band called the Beatles used Klaus Voormann’s sketch of the band on their Revolver album – but the recent trend seems to be less “experimental German artist on LSD” and more “draw me like one of your French girls”.