Paper Substitutes
Record labels as stand-ins for people, genres and experiences
In my first post on record labels, I looked at what information is shown on a label, what labels do and what instruction they provide. I started to think about label art as information design and posed some questions about what makes labels iconic and what gives them a sense of history and continuity.
In the second post, I excavated some examples from my record collection and some notes I’ve made over the years in a notebook I keep just for recording features of labels I find interesting. I considered horizontal label text versus curved, noted some creative ways of displaying the sides of records beyond conventional numbering and lettering, and made some videos to show label designs in motion at 33 or 45 RPM.
I hope these pieces convey the impression I have of record labels as objects that thread aesthetics and functionality to history and memory. I believe that what I’ve been saying about the labels also has meaning for the music and musicians they represent and the listeners who connect to those musicians through the recordings.
Record labels iconify many things: the style and design aspects that have always been crucial to music’s audiovisuality; the evolution of record companies, musicians and genres; the relationship musicians have with their recorded legacy; the relationships listeners have with the music and musicians; and the point of an otherwise imaginary contact that all of these actors and more have with each other.
For this third set of reflections, I want to focus on this last point and say a bit more about how record labels function as stand-ins or substitutes for other things, such as people, events and experiences.
Aura
To begin, let’s consider the aura attached to certain record labels. I’m thinking here of how certain labels are prized by collectors, whether the treasure is original Vertigo swirl pressings or the kind of obscure 78s whose seekers Amanda Petrusich chronicles in her book Do Not Sell at Any Price.
I would guess that pretty much any record collector would say that it’s the ‘music itself’ that matters (scare quotes because that simple term carries a lot of ideological baggage within it, which I won’t attempt to unpack here). But how to be sure that you’re hearing the best, most authentic, truest, original or intended version of a recording?
The main way that collectors go about that process is through identifying particular pressings. Here, the object becomes all important: what is pressed into the dead wax of the disc (vital matter for the collector) and what is on the label. (Sleeves are important too, but how to be sure that the disc inside the sleeve matches what is stated on the sleeve?)
I’ve mentioned aura, so I’ll briefly mention Walter Benjamin. The German thinker’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (the English title from the translation of Benjamin’s 1939 version) posited that, with the move towards the mass production of artworks such as photographs and films, the ‘aura’ of the unique work of art was lost and, with it, the artwork’s connection to ritual.
Prescient as Benjamin’s arguments were for thinking about the production and ownership of artworks might be democratised, it’s possible to argue, as many have, that mass produced artworks have led to the creation of new auras and rituals. I think that’s a particularly compelling argument with records, whose mass reproducibility only increases the quest for the most authentic pressings, the truest fidelity, and so on. It’s not so much that records are mass produced as that there are some mass produced items which are seen (and heard) as more authentic than others.
This is where the record label plays a vital role. In promising to reveal the origin of the sound and music it ‘merely’ describes, the label offers a guarantee of authenticity. This is an authenticity that cancels out the potential paradox of craving after a mass-produced, commercially marketed product, or rather, that transcends such possibilities by aiming for the rarity of the ‘original’.
As Richard Osborne writes in his book Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, in relation to the collection of old 78s:
‘In response to the mass reproduction of records there has been a repeated turn from the commercial to the “authentic”. The record is part of the problem, but it also provides the solution. What better if this non-commercial music—rendered so by both its origins and its age—is housed on a “non-commercial” disc? Forget the major-label reissue (which came out when everyone was buying this music) find the original the original release on the obscure label.’
In the section from which this quotation comes, Osborne focuses on the collectors of early American vernacular genres, especially blues, jazz and country. These are the kinds of collectors chronicled in Petrusich’s book, in films like Desperate Man Blues, and in online features on collectors such as Robert Crumb.
Osborne quotes Crumb discussing the layers of history and biography that get attached to old records and using a concept that brings us back to Benjamin: ‘Somebody of that era bought it and listened to it, and that record carries that aura from whoever else had handled and appreciated that object.’
This search for authenticity and how it can be depicted from record labels refers to place as much as time. Going back to the original is also an act of exploration, the uncovering of the past as a foreign country. As Osborne puts it, ‘Through these labels elsewhere can enter the home’.
There’s an argument to be made that all collecting is about an attempt to return to and/or preserve the objects that call to mind lost pasts, places, people and events. It is their very remoteness, the ever-present danger of loss and disappearance, that makes things collectible in the first place.
These pasts may not necessarily have ever been part of the collector’s experience: the loss they represent is more a collective than an individual one. This is already the case for American collectors of American genres—by far the most chronicled of record collectors in my (linguistically limited) experience. But that sense of distance and mystery may be even more evident when people are collecting or journeying through sound to musical cultures that are distant from them in geography as well as time.
The collection Longing for the Past: The 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia, released by Dust-to-Digital in 2013, provides a good example. The listing of exotic and mysterious musical genres on the hype sticker that markets the release to its assumed Anglophone audience is breathless, excitable:
Buddhist chants Laotian village music Early gamelan ensembles Cambodian brass bands Burmese piano improvisations Thai xylophone virtuosos Vietnamese trance music and much more!
I’ve written elsewhere about the ways in which musics from distant times and places get repackaged in 21st-century collections as a way of making the old new and exciting. Here, I want to stick to what the role of the record label is in these collections as well as in other publications about early recorded music.
The first thing to note with the labels used to illustrate the book that comes with the Longing for the Past box set is just how gorgeous many of them are as designs.
My sense of these labels as beautiful and unusual design is driven partly by my unfamiliarity with the language and the visual style. For me, a sense of otherness is already in place before I ever hear the music.
Displayed in this manner in the pages of a book, the labels also remind me of collections of postage stamps. And, like stamps, they signal a delivery from elsewhere before the envelope is ever opened. The otherness can most fully be delivered when the sounds are heard, but the initial site of the label is already opening the door to new experience, and this is part of the anticipation and thrill.
From head shots to label shots
The use of these labels as illustrations serves another purpose too. They stand in for, or substitute, the sight of the musicians whose recordings they illustrate. When researching recordings from the early part of the twentieth century, I’ve often noticed how few pictures have survived of musicians and how their presence has been outsourced instead to record labels.
The examples below are taken from two books from the Studio Vista ‘Blues Paperbacks’ series launched in the 1960s—Robert Dixon and John Godrich’s Recording the Blues and Tony Russell’s Blacks, Whites and Blues.
Both books use what I call ‘label shots’ in place of ‘head shots’. That makes more obvious sense in Dixon and Godrich’s book; they are, after all, focussing on recordings rather than musicians’ biographies. Yet the device of the label shot has also, at this point, become a norm for representing musicians too.
Russell’s book discusses the ways that record companies categorised and marketed according to the race of the musicians. In the example above, the recordings are from separate companies and different dates but it’s worth remembering that companies would often release music in their ‘race’ and ‘old-time’ or ‘hillbilly’ categories simultaneously and distinguish them by catalogue numbers. Racial difference was therefore stamped into the record via the label, with few pictures provided in catalogues or on record sleeves to give clues to the artists’ identities.
There are lots of label shots in place of head shots on Jonathan Ward’s fascinating Excavated Shellac website, which explores early recordings from around the world. Ward’s posts are invariably accompanied by label shots because we don’t have access to the musicians other than by the sounds they produced. It’s likely that many were never photographed. But they were phonographed and the result of that process can still be photographed as long as the objects survive.
Vinyl archaeology
Scholarship on early vernacular music was often informed by collectors, leading to histories, biographies, discographies, and the setting up of reissue labels such as Yazoo, New World and Document. These labels carried on the work undertaken by the American artist and collector Harry Smith in the 1950s, whose most famous work was the Anthology of American Folk Music issued by Folkways.
Reissuing has been around since at least the dawn of the LP era, when record companies compiled old jazz recordings that had been released on 78s onto albums. As reissuing practices developed through the twentieth century, there was often the notion of unearthing ‘buried treasures’, of bringing things up from ‘the vaults’, and other such archaeological terms (see Ward’s ‘excavated shellac’ for another).
For the most part, ‘phonographic archaeology’ differs from straightforward reissuing in its emphasis on collectors, listeners and researchers digging up the treasures of the past rather than on record companies looking to repackage and re-sell their products. The distinction is never complete, however, because many diggers end up selling their finds in one form or another.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of is a 2-CD compilation released by Yazoo in 2006, presenting rare 1920s and 1930s recordings from the collections of Richard Nevins, Pete Whelan, Frank Mere, Dave Freeman, Joe Bussard, Chris King, Mark Blaesing, John Coffee, John Tefteller, Richard Spottswood and Don Kent. It’s a typical example of phonographic archaeology, employing an amusing Robert Crumb illustration that refers to the records as ‘the Dead Sea Scrolls of record collecting’. The accompanying essay details the eccentricities of a range of collectors of various objects, though records are the main theme. There are photographs of people, cartoons and scans of catalogues, but the dominant visual presence is the record labels. As much as any grainy black and white photograph, these circular substitutes highlight the growing chasm between the time these records were made and the present.
As with the Yazoo collections, the lavish box sets issued by Dust-to-Digital—often comprised of hardback books with essays and photographs and with CDs housed in the inside covers—use record labels as substitutes for disappeared musicians. The illustrations below show examples from Longing for the Past and Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days, a collection of early-to-mid-century recordings from around the world.
In these collections, the record label again becomes a stand-in for the recording. Pictures of discs would look much the same and keep viewers and potential listeners at some remove, but labels individualise records. The label offers a more attainable and intimate possibility for the listener-collector-fan as it is something they can possess and get close to while the actual singer remains inaccessible.
Simulacra
Another way in which record labels act as substitutes or stand-ins is when they simulate earlier labels. I’ve already mentioned reissuing as a form of archaeology; simulation would be more like a cross between restoration and revival. It often accompanies archaeological reissue projects.
Let’s return to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Music, which I described in one conference presentation as ‘the ur-text of popular music reissuing’. This lauded compilation, originally released in 1952 on Moses Asch’s Folkways label, collected together rare recordings from the 1920s and 1930s that had originally been released as 78s. As related by various chroniclers, including Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, Smith’s unique compilation would go on to serve as a touchstone for the US folk music revival of the late 1950s and 1960s. Its impact was recognized again in 1997 when the Smithsonian Institution, which had acquired the Folkways catalogue on Asch’s death a decade earlier, reissued the Anthology as a 6-CD box set, bringing it to a new audience. In 2014, the Portland-based Mississippi Records (since relocated to Chicago) released an 8-LP reissue of the Anthology, available as four double albums or as a limited edition box set. This collection reproduced the three double albums of the Anthology that had appeared in 1952 alongside a fourth volume that extended the story. An email from Mississippi Records, as quoted on Discogs, described the reissue as follows:
‘Mississippi Records is proud to present a reproduction of the Anthology Of American Folk Music as it originally was released in 1952. Each volume is a double LP, housed in a cloth bound super thick cardboard gatefold sleeve with a tip on print on the front. For volumes 1 - 3, there is a reproduction of the original liner notes. The vinyl is 200 gram. We have gone to great lengths to reproduce the LPs just as they originally were designed by Harry Smith. All the materials and mastering are as top notch as possible.’
This simulation extended, naturally, to the design of the labels, with adjustments made to reflect the reissuing company’s details and new catalogue number.
2014 also saw the reissue of another folk music anthology, Elektra’s The Folk Box, which had originally been issued fifty years before as a sort of bridge between Smith’s Anthology and the new recordings of emerging folk revivalists. The reissue, an anniversary edition released for Record Store Day, again went for simulation of the original box. In this case, the label is a closer match to the original save for a new catalogue number and some additional copyright information.
The 2014 edition also came with a 7-inch single featuring Tom Paxton’s ‘the Last Thing on My Mind’ on one side and Judy Collins’ Dylan cover ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ on the other. Each side featured distinctive label art, marking it as an unusual case of different label logos and designs featuring on the same disc.
While I’ve been drawing on examples here from reissued folk and blues recordings, the use of simulacra labels is widespread across genres and not restricted to reissues. Below are four of the many I could have picked from my own collection: a reissue of an album by Chilean folk-rock group Los Blops that replicates the original label (original 1970; reissue 2006); the use of the timeless Columbia legacy label for Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (2013); an equally timeless Atlantic label for one of the 2014 Led Zeppelin remasters; and the recent (2024) release of Alice Coltrane’s previously (officially) unissued Carnegie Hall Concert as though it were a long lost Impulse! pressing.
Another way that label designs have afterlives is through the reproduction or imitation of record labels as designs used on CDs. Yazoo is a good example of this. When the label started out in the late 1960s, initially under the name Belzona, it used designs that were clearly influenced by the classic pre-WW2 labels whose work the company was reissuing, most obviously the Black Patti peacock.
Similar label designs were later used on the compact discs of sets like The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, further cementing the iconicity of vintage labels into the reissue package.
A similar move from record label to compact disc design can be found in many reissue projects, such as the Three Score and Ten collection celebrating seventy years of the pioneering British folk label Topic.
It’s more difficult to be sure whether such practices will continue in the streaming era. Simulation now takes other forms, such as the album sleeve rather than the label on platforms like iTunes and Spotify. But digital platforms are also part of what encourages the return to physical artefacts and the representation of them as vintage objects. The fetishization of the sepia, the faded, the washed-out and the distressed that dominates so much digital content finds its ideal complement in the record label.
Such visual simulation—I’d call it the Instagram effect except that Instagram is a symptom rather than a cause of this obsession—finds its analogue (a weighty word in vinyl circles!) in sonic simulation. If the real-but-pretend record label is true to the music it describes, what is an MP3 pretending to be? Is it simulating a simulation, because that is all sound recording ever was?
Such questions move us on from the central topic of this post, more towards the kind of ‘format theory’ discussed by Jonathan Sterne in the book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. All my talk about labels and simulation may, likewise, seem to take us away from the music itself. For those of us invested in exploring the sonic landscape, however, this activity can also be a way of staying connected to sounds we’ve encountered. I know that’s the case for me. My record collection is both a set of inert objects and an endlessly (re-)discoverable resource, a set of prompts that allow me to engage with moments of musical activity that are not substitutes, that are nothing if not real.
Fascinating stuff, Richard! This all certainly takes me back to Dad's 20,000-unit LP and 78 collection, as me and my bro were growing up! I was 10 in '65, as a point of reference, and I used to love perusing his treasures in the custom, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling cabinetry in our suburban Houston den! I used to joke how it's a wonder my bro and I didn't contract PVC poisoning!
My particular fascination, as one might guess, are the labels I not only grew up with (on my albums), but the ones released when I got into "the biz," myself (radio '73-'77, retail records '77-'82).
Another physical fascination for me were the jacket spines, a love I only once found affirmation of.....an article (somewhere....and, sometime in the '70s) by Barry Hansen (aka Dr. Demento). He drew attention to the shape (Columbia's squared-off spine with unique diagonal lines toward the top adjacent to the catalog number; most others' rounded and nowhere near as distinctive), and to how a jacket's artwork was incorporated into the spine, with gatefolds, etc.
Any chance of a tap into the fluid spinal region of albums in the future, Richard? Just curious. I wish I knew where that Hansen article could be found. A guess would be in a Warner Bros. Circular in-house promo piece which he was, largely, in charge of early- to mid-'70s.
Thanks again for the memories! Dad would-a loved this!