Blu Tang Clan

I’m not convinced it is tilting it towards the past, except for those familiar with the famous covers he’s basing his work on. (Which may be nearly everyone who sees them. I’m no judge of how popular memes are.) One of the things the project does for me is to point towards a future in which graphic design is as important as other forms of proficiency in music. (Thinking about Blue Note as a label, I’m not sure there was ever more sheer skill — instrumental, compositional, engineering, design, marketing — involved in the making of individual records at any other time in history. This is surely something to aspire to, rather than to say “wasn’t it better back when?” about.) Although I would note wryly that intriguing graphic design has far too often fooled me into wanting to listen to terrible music. (Franz Ferdinand and Panic! At The Disco come to mind.)

On further reflection, you’re right about the pastness of the exercise, in the sense that it locates the Wu-Tang records firmly IN THE PAST, which they indisputably are. Not that far past, perhaps, but the telescoping of history is part of the passage of time. By flattening the timeline, Walters removes the records from their time and place (which even though it exists in the memory of more living people is still as unrecoverable as 1957) to a more timeless/eternal (your word “classic” says this) plane and out of their current dialogue with the present. As someone who mostly was not present for the music of 90s, I’m not terribly bothered by that, and am in fact eager to begin new dialogues with the decade rather than the same ones that those who remember the 90s have. Loose the moorings and let us drift out a bit, so we can take a good look at the shore. These covers are a step in that direction.

it happened far too often during the initial cd era, thinking in particular of that almost hilarious cover for kind of blue that had a fusion era miles shot and the impossibly dull cover there’s a riot goin on had on cd. these aren’t bad, and i do like the color scheme for iron man, but surely these are even more lol nineties than the originals. i think removing any piece of pop from time and place might be a bad idea (or at least pointless), but in the very least hip-hop seems incredibly rooted to it, to its benefit.