Imagine twelve-year old Diego, who is discovering heavy metal and hard rock. His friend Rodrigo’s dad was a pilot for Mexicana who flew the Mexico City – Los Angeles route, and brought him CD’s which he would then share with Diego.
Diego thus has discovered Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Guns ‘n Roses. And he can’t get enough.
Diego doesn’t know much of the genre yet, but he knows one thing to be 100% true: a kick-ass cover with dragons, demons, skulls and variations thereof means HARD ROCK / METAL ACTION.
CD’s in Mexico were imported and expensive at the time. And it’s not like today when you can pull up Spotify and check out an artist to decide if they’re worth your money. Nor will the store clerk open the CD for you to sample. So the cover is basically what you have to go on.
Diego saves up his allowances and one Saturday at the record store, while Diego’s dad is browsing the jazz albums, he sees it is on the rack. A jewel case with artwork that looks like Satan hired Boris Vallejo to paint the apocalypse. Chrome lettering. Possibly a warrior standing on a mountain of skulls. At least one dragon. Maybe lightning striking a graveyard for no reason. A motorcycle being chased by a gargoyle.
Twelve-year-old Diego immediately thinks:
THIS IS THE ONE.
Because every piece of available evidence points to it. Kill ’Em All was dangerous. Rust in Peace looked dangerous. Persistence of Time looked dangerous. Appetite for Destruction was so dangerous they had to move the cover inside.
Therefore the visual theorem is established:
More skulls = more metal.
Diego grabs it and hands over what represented an economically significant portion of your childhood. Dad looked at the cover and must have thought, “well, whatever this is, apparently my son has chosen it.”
Diego gets home. He removes the shrink wrap with enormous ceremony. Disc into CD player. Stares again at the cover while the CD player spins up and reads the table of contents.
That cover is basically a legally actionable promise. Flaming motorcycle. Graveyard. Giant bat. Demonic apocalypse. It practically screams: “THIS RECORD WILL MELT YOUR FACE AND SUMMON SOMETHING.”
And then the disc starts playing and instead of melting Diego’s face with furious riffs, turns out to be a Jim Steinman theatrical soft-rock opera – the same guy who wrote songs for AIR SUPPLY and Bonnie Tyler.
Which, to be fair, is its own very specific kind of lunacy — enormous arrangements, melodrama, bombast, motorcycles, teenage death fantasies — but it is absolutely not the thrash-metal dragon violence the packaging implied to young Diego.
This album may be the purest example yet of cover-to-content genre mismatch.
The exact emotional progression goes something like this:
“Holy shit, look at this cover.”
“Holy shit, this cost two allowances.”
“Holy shit, here comes the first song.”
“…why is this man singing like he’s in a Broadway production about losing his virginity?”
Diego feels betrayed.
A few weeks later…Diego gets album-cover catfished, AGAIN.
At that age you don’t update the model after one failure. You think, “Okay, Bat Out of Hell was some freak statistical anomaly. The skull-and-demon heuristic is still fundamentally sound.”
So a month later: fresh allowances, renewed confidence, back into the record store like a tiny venture capitalist making a second investment in infernal visual branding.
Another album promises METAL in the most metal way possible: with a Frank Frazetta cover. An awesome looking viking with an axe, probably after having savagely destroyed several demons in awe-inspiring berserker fury. The band? Molly Hatchet. Never heard of them. But isn’t a hatchet a weapon? The cover seems metal enough. Frank Frazetta is promising a lot:
barbarian warrior / giant axe / fantasy maiden / impossible muscles / glowing sky / imminent bloodshed
…and then the album starts and Diego gets Southern rock boogie.
Not bad music necessarily, but for twelve-year-old Diego expecting something halfway between Megadeth and Conan the Barbarian, it is a betrayal that’s very hard to quantify.
Ever since, Diego has had a serious aversion to both Meat Loaf and Molly Hatchet.