Scroll through the shortlisted album sleeves for this year’s Hyundai Mercury Prize and it soon becomes apparent that contemporary cover art is in every bit as rude health as the music.
There’s Nadine Shah’s Holiday Destination, featuring war photojournalist Christian Stephen’s startling shot of a young boy standing in the shell of a bombed-out Gaza building. The hellfire-lit contorted bodies of Everything Everything’s A Fever Dream. Then there’s the laterite-orange sleeve of Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile: five defiant-looking African tribeswomen, all coiled necks and imperious expressions, trapped in amber like some long-lost royal civilisation.
Given the current vinyl revival, where millennials are just as likely to hang albums as cherished living-room objets d’art or share sleeves as social media memes, it’s no surprise such attention has been lavished on the visuals. Mzwandile Buthelezi, the South African artist who created Your Queen Is a Reptile’s artwork, had a somewhat weightier task than most.
Each song on Your Queen Is a Reptile is named after a visionary black woman (or “queen”), because, as Sons of Kemet’s band-leader/saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings points out: “I focused on queens as opposed to kings because we need to unravel our connection to patriarchy as the norm. We need to demystify masculinity’s place at the forefront of our politics and religious structures. The first step is acknowledgement of the woman’s place within the course of history.”
These women range from US abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman to Doreen Lawrence, through to Hutchings’ Bajan great-grandmother, Ada Eastman (“A powerful woman and matriarch who lived until 103,” says Hutchings). By choosing to coronate, say, Nanny of the Maroons (an 18th-century Jamaican leader), or the 20th-century social psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark, Your Queen Is a Reptile also sends its listeners spiralling down endless Wikipedia rabbit holes.
Buthelezi had the unenviable task of representing all this. Not only that, but the Johannesburg-based artist with the graffiti background also had to reflect the album’s music: a heady jazz melange that splutters with influences ranging from soca to grime. Your Queen Is a Reptile was released in March, but Hutchings emailed his brief to Buthelezi nearly six months earlier. Hutchings tells us what happened next …
How did you come into contact with Buthelezi?
He’s been on the South African jazz scene for some time, designing albums. For the last couple of years, I’ve been immersing myself in the South African jazz scene and learning about the musicians, including how they depict their music visually. We worked with him for Shabaka and the Ancestors [Hutchings’ splinter group] album Wisdom of Elders (2016).
What brief did you give him for Your Queen Is a Reptile?
I talked with him [on email] about what the album was about and the attitude I wanted for the feeling of the artwork … In some way, the artwork frames how the listener will hear the music. [Listening] is not a purely aural experience.
What ideas did the artist initially come up with?
One of his ideas was inspired by ancient Nubian armies. The other was a very old picture he’d found showing a line of regal women. He took that as representing the 10 queens of the album. [In the final artwork, there are five “queens” on the front of the record and five on the back.]
Your Queen Is a Reptile is the first Sons of Kemet’s release on Impulse! (influential jazz label that was home to John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra), whose albums had a distinct orange and black colour scheme. Does this explain Your Queen’s vibrant orange colour?
That was happenstance. Buthelezi did lots of colour variations and orange just looked the best. But … I did send him a bunch of Impulse! sleeves, as one of things I love about their covers is the use of solid blank space to create atmosphere. On Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, there’s a frame of his face and all this solid blue. I like the idea of not having the entire sleeve taken up by stuff.
What do the grainy dots in the sleeve’s top left-hand corner signify?
If you see the image for Wisdom of Elders, it’s very similar; you’ll also find these dots. He [Buthelezi] depicts a fish-like apparition giving knowledge which blows through windows. Those dots hark back to an image; the information being passed on.
What’s the response to the aesthetics been like since the album release?
I’ve met people who are grateful for the image … It’s a continuation of a type of imagery we should be more accustomed to, but unfortunately we’re not.
How important is an album’s artwork to the music?
It’s a crucial part of the story of the album. I’ve had a thing about album art for a long time. When I listen to an album, I find myself looking at the artwork while I listen. That really frames how you take in the music.
I remember listening to Bjork’s Vespertine (2001). It’s the one album I remember really loving the artwork and looking deeply into it. If you look inside the booklet, every page is a different piece of artwork. I loved that. The jazz ones such as Charles Mingus’ artwork, or John Coltrane’s Stellar Regions, where he just looks up towards a spotlight, are amazing too.
Do you think record-buyers have a different approach to album art in the digital age?
Vinyl is coming back in a major way. Having good album art is a way of producing an artwork that every single person who listens to the music can have in their hands and then put in their living room. If you download something or listen to it digitally, you don’t have that piece of artwork. I like the fact it’s tangible; you can touch and see it … It’s like an antidote to the digital world.
