“He was quiet, softly spoken,” Davis says. “Being bisexual seemed to be the get-out clause at that time,” she opines.ĭespite Sylvester’s flashy threads - and a falsetto that soared so high it scraped heaven - both Davis and Calvo describe him as comparatively reserved in private. music business,” people weren’t fully ready to embrace a gay-gay disco star. “In leisure time, if he was in gay company, he would use the term ‘she’ but in public always referred to himself as ‘he.’” While she admits that the androgynous imagery of glam rockers like Bowie and Marc Bolan helped bring about “a certain tolerance in the U.K. ![]() ![]() “Sylvester was happy being a man,” Davis explains. His face was painted to perfection, which added to the drama of his androgynous stage persona.”ĭavis – whose book Mighty Real: Sharon Davis Remembers Sylvester is currently being expanded and rewritten now that the film rights have been picked up – says Sylvester casually used feminine and masculine pronouns. “His hair was in a turban, and he was wearing lots and lots of bracelets you could hear clinking in the back of the room. “Sylvester and his posse hit the stage like an 5F tornado,” Calvo raves. Rudy Calvo, a veteran makeup artist who has worked with everyone from Patti LaBelle to Chaka Khan to Natalie Cole, remembers the first time he saw Sylvester and the Hot Band perform at L.A.’s Whisky a Go Go in 1973. He wore women’s clothing, hit the stage wearing makeup and took gender-bending flamboyance to peaks that even a glam-era David Bowie never dared to scale. The cover of Flume’s 2016 full-length Skin and its depiction of an intricately designed foxglove in pink and purple hues is the product of artist Jonathan Zawanda, and another record that demonstrates the cogency of album artwork.Regardless of any brief from the record company, Sylvester was hardly closeted. With the smooth and modern digital design mirroring the album’s clean, futuristic electronica, it is clear Zawanda is a strong advocate for the relationship between music and art believing in a reciprocal nature in which the two are subcutaneously linked and provide additional interpretation and weight to each other. “Visuals give a more tangible meaning to music, but music can likewise breathe new life into art and help people make sense of it,” he summarises pithily. Zawanda’s work with Flume fittingly earned him high acclaim, and he was awarded the ARIA Music Award for Best Cover Art in the album’s year of release. ![]() He was since nominated again for the award following his design work on Flume’s 2019 release, Hi This is Flume – a true testament to the power and plaudits of album artwork projects. Such designs also have the potential to convey bold social statements, and Kanye West has never been an artist afraid of causing a stir. His 2010 release, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was accompanied by five alternative covers inspired by the album’s brooding concept and painted by the American contemporary visual artist, George Condo. It’s official artwork depicts the rapper and a winged creature, which Condo describes as “a kind of fragment between a sphinx, a phoenix, and a haunting ghost” – all of which are nude. The image is an abstract representation of the dark nature of fame, a theme which West scrutinises in great detail throughout the album. In interviews following its release, Condo confirmed that the artwork was intended to be controversial, and that West wanted to release “something that will be banned.” To no surprise, this was exactly what happened, and the cover was prohibited from production in the United States and censored on streaming services the world over. “So Nirvana can have a naked human-being on their cover but I can’t have a PAINTING of a monster with no arms, and a polka dot tail and wings,” West exclaimed in a well-timed Twitter outburst, and it was later confirmed that the artwork was a deliberately planned publicity stunt.Ī contemporary example of a striking but considerably less controversial artwork comes from a band who were swept to fame in the wave of 90’s Britpop.
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