Pop Culture Fiend: December 2023

December 27, 2023

Great Album Covers: Breakfast in America, Big Lizard in My Backyard and She's So Unusual

Supertramp's Breakfast in America album cover

The cover for Supertramp's 1979 smash Breakfast in America is nothing short of a masterpiece of composition. It features the view from an airplane window of a wonderfully inventive interpretation of New York City. In the foreground, a smiling waitress poses like the Statue of Liberty. In her right hand she holds a tray with a glass of orange juice substituting for a torch. In her other hand, instead of a tablet, is a menu featuring the album's title. Behind her is a model cityscape of Manhattan -- an assortment of high rise buildings and skyscrapers represented perfectly by plain but cleverly arranged salt and pepper shakers, condiment bottles, coffee cups, egg cartons and other breakfast-related items. A year following its release, this album deservingly won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.

Dead Milkmen's Big Lizard in My Backyard album cover

Cover art doesn't get much more on the nose than what you see on this, the Dead Milkmen's first album. But the cartoonish illustration (designed by the band's drummer) is also whimsical and consistent with the band's style of injecting humor into its hardcore punk.

Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual album cover

Photographed by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, the cover of Cyndi Lauper's 1983 debut LP She's So Unusual helped establish her zany persona. The shot captures Lauper in the middle of some jerky, uninhibited barefoot dancing in front of a wax museum in Coney Island, a Brooklyn, NY neighborhood close to where Lauper grew up. The photo's kinetic energy and the cover's bright splashy colors convey the playful, care-free spirit of both the artist and American zeitgeist in the early 1980's. Interestingly, several decades after the album's release, several additional photos from this cover shoot surfaced (see below.)