Album of the day (#4244): In The Flat Field by Bauhaus

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

In The Flat Field by Bauhaus (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1980.
Country:
Overall rank: 1,132
Average rating: 78/100 (from 249 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. Double Dare
2. In The Flat Field
3. God In An Alcove
4. Dive
5. Spy In The Cab
6. Small Talk Stinks
7. St. Vitus Dance
8. Stigmata Martyr
9. Nerves

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[MadhattanJack]

Honestly I'm a bit surprised that this album is ranked as high as it is; I like the title track, but overall it always struck me as nearly the epitome of style-over-substance that was typical of early 4AD releases. (4AD later became my all-time favorite label, but to some extent that's like saying "Cardinal Distributing later became my favorite vending machine manufacturer.")

So.... about that album cover.

Obviously there's an argument to be made that people in 1980 bought the album mostly because of the cover, because "you can see the guy's junk." I'd like to say "that's not why I bought the album," but I can't since I didn't buy the album. (I vaguely recall trying to steal it from an adult bookstore, but then having to give it back after being caught by the cashier.) To me, the real question has always been, what is the guy doing? I was (just barely) involved in a discussion of this once, on one of those old (now-defunct) e-mail listservs in the late 90's. This was before Google Images was invented, so things like this were a little harder to figure out back then. The basic idea though is that the photo was not actually commissioned by Bauhaus, but rather lobbied for by David J (the bass player). He'd seen it in an art gallery, part of a collection of "postcards" made by American photographer Duane Michals and exhibited in the UK in 1978, the same year Bauhaus-the-band was formed. This postcard is called Homage to Puvis de Chavannes, referring to French mural painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, except de Chavannes apparently never painted anything that looked like this photo. He did paint a lot of nudes, though, both male and female.

The closest thing we could come up with was a painting called La Guerre, which has three mostly-naked guys on horseback in the near-background, all blowing long heraldic trumpets which in medieval France were known as buisines. (Here's a buisine you can buy for $466, at least as of the moment I'm typing this.)



The problem is that if you look at a larger, clearer version of the postcard image, it's hard to believe that's actually a trumpet. We decided it's more likely to be some rolled-up paper or something, which they used because Michals didn't want to spend the money to buy or rent a real antique trumpet (and they didn't have the internet back then anyway, so it would have been difficult to find one in good condition). I'm guessing someone might have said, "we can't use this, Duane, they'll see it's just some cheap rolled-up paper," and he would have replied, "that's why we're going to blur the whole photo." And the someone would have said, "but people can still see the junk, right?" And Michals would have said, "ohhh, yeah."

The thing is, after 44 years, it's still not entirely clear that this is even meant to be a trumpet. Everybody just assumes this because of the general shape of the object and the fact that what appears to be the narrow end is being held up to the guy's mouth. But there could be other explanations — explanations that nobody seems to want to consider, since most of them are probably much more obscene than "it's just a stupid trumpet."