Electric Ladyland - That Cover

November 12^th – When does art become pornography, in fact what constitutes pornography? If I were to show a b/w, sensitively lit photograph of a naked woman with erect nipples and one of a plain lit man with an erect penis, which of those two would be classed as pornography? My guess is the latter as, in our over-sexualised lives the frequency with which we see photographs of naked women has de-sensitised the form whereas the frequency of erect cocks is still sufficiently rare as to make it overtly sexual.

But where does the line lie if I see a photograph that I think is art but other people think is pornographic? Am I allowed to put it on public display, admire it, define and distribute it, or would it be classed as anti-social and written off as just the machinations of a D.O.M.? At this juncture my guess is you’ll be looking for some sort of definition as to the opening question… Sorry, not here. You should know by now; what is it? That’s right, more questions than answers here; I do it just to get folk thinking on things, mischievous little fucker that I am.

But, present chat in mind, there’s a couple of things that sparked this off for me. One is that I’ve just started writing a one-acter about the Page Three culture we’re living in and what that’s done to the women’s movement, and the research is proving to be very illuminating. The other is the launch of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland double album, released on this date in 1968, the one with Voodoo Chile on it, and the controversy surrounding the cover photo when it was released. I’ve patched a copy of it for you to see (no hate-mail, please, this is up for photo-discussion not personal derision) and there’s much to be gleaned from it.

There’s no distraction from the bodies on display and no sensationalist use of backdrop or male intrusion. All the ladies portrayed are portrayed in formal fashion, non-erotic, and a number of racial forms are depicted; white, black, Hispanic, American Indian amongst them. All are looking straight to camera with a benign expression that bears no hint of aggression, submission or sexuality and the only step outside the chiaroscuro format of the photograph are the three seeming album covers; two taken from the inside cover of the Electric Ladyland album and one of the front cover of Mr. Hendrix’s previous album, Axis Bold As Love. So, does my appreciation of the cover and my feeling that its art miss the pornographic point?

Given all that, I find the album cover very pleasing (indeed, when I bought the album this was the only cover it was offered in so, although I would’ve bought a new Hendrix release even if it’d been wrapped rancid bacon, still, the cover was a pleasing bonus). Let’s say though that the cover was not, as many people suggested at the outset, Mr. Hendrix’s choice. Track Records (the releasing label) had its own art department, which produced this cover depicting nineteen nude women lounging in front of a black background taken by photographer David Montgomery and, indeed, Mr. Hendrix expressed his displeasure and embarrassment with the cover. If you’ll allow me a little leeway here I’ll give you all a chance to shoot me down in flames with my proposition as to how that art department coincidentally allowed greater insight into the psyche of two connected but disconnected countries with their choice of cover.

The U.S.A. When the album was first released this cover was not available in the US (the country of Mr. Hendrix’s birth, this soon-to-be world famous son of a nation) and we have to deal with the first factor to be part of the conundrum; that he was black. Civil rights disturbances were rife in many parts of the country and Black Power was becoming a force to reckon with and here was a black man using the naked bodies of, amongst others, white women to market his type of, in their view, drug-addled, anti-social philosophies. The Vietnam War was going awry for the US, the numbers of returning coffins was growing larger by the day, Mr. Hendrix had already made his position clear on the matter and we were only 10 months away from Woodstock and his rendition of Star Spangled Banner. But more importantly than either of these things was the strength of the US feminist political movement at the time of the album’s release. Active since the early 60’s there was a real upsurge in the US concerning form and content during the late 60’s, and that must have formed some convulsions of corporate thinking when this Track Records Ad Dept front cover was first mooted…and there’s nothing a US corporation hates more than seeing a loss in profit due to an oversight concerning the punching-weight of the neo-cons and the liberal left.

The U.K. Why was the cover seen as OK in England? Well, my contention is that we were still very much a man’s culture in the mid/late 60’s. We had our bands of course, Beatles, Stones, etc, but the fantasy they peddled saw women as passive objects of entertainment. That’s not to say the US didn’t have similar misogynistic tendencies in their rock world but we were playing catch-up with the US in the sense of feminism and the, then, present-day position of women in society. I’d reckon we were about five years behind the US, indeed the first women’s liberation conference didn’t take place until 1970 and organisations like Spare Rib and Off Our Backs didn’t become active until around then either. Of course they didn’t just spring up from nowhere, there had to be a lead-in to their eventual surfacing over here, but it says something about the strength of the male dominated culture of the time that, IMHO, the women’s liberation movement didn’t really become a real until the 80’s. Now, it could be you’ll consider all the foregoing to be bollocks, just the misguided rambling of ‘a bloke’. If that’s your take then, fine.

I accept your opinion on that. 
It was just that, by revisiting the English version of the Electric Ladyland cover, I wanted to direct the spotlight of self understanding for myself onto something you perspicacious lot already knew; namely my belief that, when it comes to Page Three, far from becoming the sharp beam of enlightenment at the end of decades of struggle and sacrifice by countless women, the Page Three culture isn’t helping to breathe life into art or have any effect on the suffocation of pornography…