Deviations from Select Albums 1: 15. The Who

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

15. The Who - Who's Next

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This work consists of two 9X9 images on an 18X10 frame. The two 1X9 blank spaces that were left allowed the placement of one image slightly above the other. If you see that the horizons of the two
images are perfectly joined together at the centre, that is purely coincidental. I didn't see it myself. I was too preoccupied with deciding which image should be on the left
and which should be on the right. It was good to retain the album title on the original image alone, and so I positioned it at right.

The seemingly endless heap of slag somewhat spans the sluggishness of decaying English cities in the 1970s; an unwanted overgrowth the Industrial Revolution. That was
a time when "summer" and "spring" and "fall" were common in song lyrics and "sunshine" and "rain" equated with love and loneliness in romantic melodies.
But when you look up at an oncoming storm while standing on a potentially cancer-causing junk of metal leftover, the comfort of having
discharged seems forgotten. There is much uncertainty about the future on this image. What we were afraid of back then are
unfolding now. The continuous horizon portends painfully - or maybe it's just a "teen-age wasteland".

Here's the original album cover art design.

No. 11, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 28, Rolling Stone The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time;
No. 39, Entertainment Weekly, 100 Greatest Albums Ever; No. 48, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.

No. 100, Rolling Stone, The 100 Greatest Album Covers.

Photo by Ethan Russell. Album produced by The Who and Glyn Johns. Track, Decca 1971.

The cover artwork shows a photograph, taken at Easington Colliery, of the band apparently having just urinated on a large concrete piling protruding
from a slag heap. The decision to shoot the picture came from (band members John) Entwistle and (Keith) Moon discussing Stanley Kubrick
and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the band members were unable to urinate,
so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect. In 2003, the television channel VH1
named Who's Next's cover one of the greatest album covers of all time. Full article

(A) Baba O'Riley - Bargain - Love Ain't for Keeping - My Wife - The Song is Over

(B) Getting in Tune - Going Mobile - Behind Blue Eyes - Won't Get Fooled Again