Be My Number Two. Joe Jackson. 1984. A&M.

The cover artwork for the 1957 Blue Note record Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2, shows a now iconic photograph printed in blue ink of the young saxophonist standing alongside his musical instrument. Rollins is posed gazing upwards, the expression on his face one of bemused expectation; the face of mid-century American genius at work. Because of their overt commercialism, record cover artwork often signifies. Its language is almost always erotic, with at least a hint of some form of danger, and, at its very best, is an abbreviated pictorial commentary on contemporaneous commercial aesthetics. The Rollins cover, for instance, is a master class on artistic and hipster hubris, a single image critique of the merging vectors of class dynamics and sexuality in post-war advertising graphics, and a history and genesis of jazz as transgressive cultural dialectic. The abundance of signifiers must have prompted someone in the art department at A&M Records to appropriate the image for the English singer-songwriter Joe Jackson’s record Body and Soul. Following the minimalist pop classicism of his previous LP Night and Day, Jackson looked inward to a dichotomy of self and found a territorial expanse capable of drawing and holding a wider audience. The scope and arrangements of his compositions broadened but what didn’t change was Jackson’s innate talent for recognizing and giving shape to our collective desires with songs that, by dint of their simple charm, worked their way onto radio. The love ballad Be My Number Two suggests the pre-Sondheim twentieth century Broadway of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart filtered through the digital recording technology of the 1980s. This is Jackson at the pinnacle of his commercial success, when he captured with perfect pitch the tone of popular romantic sentimentality and condensed it into a lyric of heartbreak and emotional entreaty that, because of his expressive vocal, deftly avoids the bilge of dismissible mawkish glitz. The appearance of cultural signifiers this polyvalent on  eighties radio was a triumphant continuation of the rock and roll tradition, bursting with social cosmopolitan relevance. With melodies that stuck happily in the head.

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