Roxy Girls!— and the History of Album Artwork
By Kitty Quinn, Photographed by Milan Lazovski, Makeup by Kitty Quinn, Models: Libby Faye Anderson & Aaliyah Wheeler
8/23/2023
From the dawn of time, women have inspired countless works of art… so it was only natural when they began to be featured on album artwork. Until the late 1940s and 1950s, this was still a relatively new marketing venture— unlike now where many don’t bat an eye at such. However, during its infancy as puritanical notions surrounding sex began to slowly change in the preparatory years to the sexual revolution, these girls served as a way to cater to record corporations and appeal to the male gaze, leaving a booming industry in its footpath.
In the late teens to the 1920s, record companies saw higher value in selling phonographs due to the grandiosity of a one-time, serious purchase rather than a cheap item like a record. Due to this lack of attention, oftentimes records were cased in brown paper bags, and only later did cardboard albums, similar to photo albums, become available to protect and organize them. With the Great Depression soon hitting at the close of the decade, record sales plummeted from 150 million a year in the late 20s to a measly 5 million following the stock market crash; jukeboxes being nearly the only thing keeping these companies afloat. In 1939, surviving this major low point for the industry, Columbia hired the creator of cover art, Alex Steinweiss. Originally met with resistance from higher management due to an increase in production costs, it's needless to say that they stood corrected once they saw a dramatic jump in sales following an initial run, proving that graphics did in fact attract and entice consumers. Following the birth of cover art along with the introduction of the standard long-playing record jacket (introduced in 1948 by Steinweiss as well), cover art flourished and became a new standard within the record industry. Up until the post-war years when labels began to have larger budgets and cheaper printing methods, photographs were used sparingly, as hand coloring and colored images were still highly expensive during the time.
Though sex has always been ingrained into the fiber of mainstream music, it wasn’t until post-WWII and during the staunch era of McCarthyism that we began seeing pin-ups, also known as “cheesecake girls”, displayed on album art. The so-called “American dream” had been uprooted due to the vast changes made to society following the war, and culture could no longer go back to what it had been before. With second-wave feminism just peeking around the corner due to the newfound independence women held, many returning servicemen were met with shock and longed for normalcy— but not all. Among those returning, there were many who also began rejecting these norms and sought refuge within the queer community. This stew of cultural juxtapositions thus created the perfect recipe for a future where ideals surrounding sex began to morph and be viewed in a more lax way. With the explosion of Hollywood and pin-up girls also sweeping the nation during these years, record companies began to recognize this growing trend and utilized it as a marketing tool to appeal to the masses of straight men in the name of the infamous saying, “sex sells”.
That being said, while this use of women in cover art can be seen as exploitative and demeaning (and is, to an extent), many female vocalists saw this as an opportunity to heighten the spectrum of their record sales and even try to find agency in this hyper-sexual format. Some famous examples of this are Julie London with Calendar Girl, which drew direct reference from pin-up artists, as well as Eartha Kitt, who utilized a femme fatale persona that challenged racist stereotypes of black women and allowed her to reclaim her sexuality. Jazz artists capitalized on this new-found art form perhaps the most, like Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass who featured a woman slathered in whipped cream on the album Whipped Cream and Other Delights, as well as Big band albums like Music To Keep Your Husband Happy To (How To Strip For Your Husband/How to Belly Dance For Your Husband) by Sonny Lester & His Orchestra further catering to this industry fueled by the male gaze.
This influence has not ceased through the passage of time and has led artists like Roxy Music to adopt it primarily when it came to what dictated their album art. Becoming famous over the years for their depiction of women on their album covers paired with their avant-garde and glamor-laden art rock sound, Roxy Music is perhaps one of the most iconic examples when it comes to the sexualization of album artwork. With nearly all eight studio works from the band featuring nearly pornographic photographs of women reminiscent of the dawn of pin-up girl covers partnered with an “in vogue flair”, it successfully set the group apart from others and created an almost kitschy approach to the artwork style.
Covers have always excited the masses and left them wondering what could possibly be inside, but it has become so commonplace within present times that so little thought now goes towards why. From repression to the blossoming of sexuality, though this style of artwork has been met with criticism for its demeaning nature, its effects were not entirely negative. It was built on the foundation of contradiction and has now become a timeless art form that has inspired countless contemporary artworks and been reclaimed in an age of sexual revolution.
