Booklet (music nerds)

Around the turn of the millennium, a group of visionary African American artists, representative of the very best of their generation, got together to release a raft of albums that have since redefined the sound of popular music. It comprised Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Questlove, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, James Poyser and J Dilla. Collectively they were known as the Soulquarians, and music nerds still marvel at the legendary albums they produced at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios, most notably Erykah Badu’s ‘Mama’s Gun’, The Roots’ ‘Things Fall Apart’, Common’s ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ and D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo’.

Being one of those nerds, I became obsessed with the haptic experience of the CD booklets of their albums. ‘Voodoo’ is a great example of this. Whereas the cover is pure Y2K “urban music” marketing, showing a buff, shirtless D’Angelo, like other Soulquarians inlays it was printed on an uncoated paper stock (rare for CDs) called Cougar, which matched the organic feeling of the music. It also contains commentary from poet Saul Williams, who writes about how — because of the way the vocals are layered and sit within the mix — it’s actually quite hard to understand a lot of what D’Angelo is singing about. This is mirrored by the way, on the back of the album, the ink sinks into the uncoated Cougar paper, rendering most of the notes there illegible. And yet, as a mood piece, this symbiosis between music and paper texture is encoded with far more information than just lyrics or liner notes. It is an example of what sociologist Paul Gilroy has called “Black vernacular culture,” where the opaque feeling of a piece of art — its ghosts if you will — is more important than the overt messages it seems to be trying to convey. As Williams writes in the ‘Voodoo’ booklet, “We speak of darkness, not as ignorance, but…as the mysteries of the unseen.”

The texture of these inlays completely inspired how I think about photobooks, in that I now feel taking a good image is not enough and pretty graphic design doesn’t cut it, if the final feeling of the book doesn’t invoke the ghosts of the project. Later editions of the Soulquarians albums were produced on the normal, coated paper stock we’re used to on CD inlays, and the difference is like watching a Wong Kar-wai film on a digitally restored DVD on an HD TV, rather than the way we all know they should be watched: on a pirated VHS tape.