Helvetica freewrite

It’s not so much that you begin to notice text, an act akin to noticing air. Rather than the ‘what’, which is text, you begin to notice the ‘how’. How it’s displayed, arranged, formatted, what the company is attempting to get you to notice with the text. It’s very elementary at times, such as when you’re in an area where the businesses may not all have the funds to drop on a big name graphic designer to play with their logo. You begin to notice how ‘Main Street’ businesses (ie the ones that are part and parcel to any small town experience) follow a sort of cleaner, deliberate look, often cultivated through the use of Helvetica. Then you’ll get into the city and see how the clean, deliberate lines of text that were formerly thought to connote professionalism are now wrapped around some anorexcic model in an American Apparel ad. Or you’ll see how the formatting of something bland like Helvetica into a longer, skinnier font reduced to outlines will look trendy and european.
Last night I went through my vinyl collection, in part mourning how the advent of the CD drastically reduced the space available for sweet drawings and photographs availalble on album covers and in part looking for texts to analyze. My favorite examples were the cover of American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and Abraxas by Carlos Santana. Now, aside from all being the product of the same sort of 60’s esque cultural zeitgeist (I am approximating; Bitches Brew came out in 1969, Abraxas in 1970, and American Beauty in 1972), they all feature an interesting study of text. American Beauty is fascinating because it epitomizes the 60’s psychaedelic obsession with ‘coding’ text. Psychaedelic artists were obsessed with forcing words into bizarre shapes, or creating bubbles of color that were actually words or hidden messages. The words ‘American Beauty’ on the cover of the album are a perfect example of this; they are so ornate and overly gilded that they appear to read either ‘American Beauty’ (the name of the album) or ‘American Reality’ (not the name of the album). This is possibly an example of sociopolitical commentary on the idea of beauty as reality, but more likely the artist being a huge fan of acid. Either way, it’s cool to look at.

Abraxas and Bitches Brew are both notable because of their jaw-droppingly awesome, wraparound gatefold album art, done by the same artist, Mati Klarwein. I like thinking about these albums in terms of text because, divorced of the text that accompanies them, they're pretty much the same. You've got incredibly dense, vibrant colors, complicated images, and women in various stages of undress. Klarwein's work was in vogue for much of the 60's and 70's, with his work being used for album covers by other musicians working in both the jazz and rock idioms.
BUT ANYWAY the point is to look at the text on these two albums. Miles Davis' album is afforded a clean, modern style of text, suiting both his reputation as an esoteric, misanthropic genius and the albums' groundbreaking music (Davis was well aware of this, he subtitled the album "Direction in Music by Miles Davis"). The matchup of futuristic text and bizarre tribal imagery sums up Davis' entire essence of contradiction: constantly moving ahead in music while remaining firmly attached to his roots in the only form of indigenous American music: jazz.
Abraxas, conversely, features weirdly ornate text that looks reminiscent of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha's work in the Art Nouveau movement. Santana is a well documented religious fanatic: he claims, among other things, to have spoken to the Metatron (the voice of God) and Jesus himself. Therefore, the text that is used for his name and the album's title suddenly draws the bizarre image into context. It no longer seems quite so weird and vaguely pornographic, but rather begins to resemble a drawing from the Rubiyayat of Omar Khayyam or even from a medieval tapestry. This perfectly suits Santana's music, which is very often meandering and boring, until a journalist affixes the adjective "spiritual" to Santana's music, which somehow always justifies long winded, pseudo-latin jazz guitar solos. The text lends credence to the overblown imagery in the same way Santana's well-documented spirtuality somehow justifies his fifteen minute guitar noodlings and collaborations with idiots like P.O.D. and that goateed hammerhead from Nickelback.