#45: Cover Contest Kickoff
We put out a tweet on July 26th announcing an album cover contest. We asked designers, artists, writers and developers to submit a pitch to make Cover Bank more accessible.
Exactly four people sent in an application.
- Immaculata Abba
Immaculata wants to create an engaging and accessible 2000-word essay that provides insight into how album art reflects Nigeria’s socio-cultural evolution over the past 60 years. Her essay will address:
- Album covers as advertising tools. She’ll look at the representation of people, objects, fashion, sex appeal etc used in the art, what the covers tell us about the Nigerian public’s desire over the years, and how that has changed over time.
- How album cover artists and musicians respond to times using their art. What were their motivations and influences?
To execute her plan, she’ll work with the wuruwuru team to understand the cover bank better, map out trends and form hypotheses. Then she’ll Identify and schedule meetings with artists and musicians to test her hypotheses, and do more desk research around Nigerian music, album covers and how art is used to reflect the times.
2. Kemi Falodun
Kemi wants to explore the decisions, research and politics that go into designing an album cover. She intends to write a 1500-word essay on some of Nigeria’s most vibrant album covers, exploring their cultural and political relevance, how they reflect the times, and how they have evolved over the years.
Back in June, she sat with Lemi Ghariokwu and talked about album covers and their evolution, his relationship with Fela, and his current work, and also spoke with artist and art director Niyi Okeowo. She’ll be returning to her recordings to write this essay.
As someone interested in visual art, she finds this intersection of music and art fascinating, and see’s this open call as a motivation to proceed with what she already started.
She previously worked on Cydne Jasmin Coleby — These collages explore intergenerational trauma.
3. Idris Ayinde
Idris wants to create a vintage-themed website that lets people quickly discover album covers and link to stream the songs. He thinks the website will be an ideal space for reference when fans of certain music eras are looking into their favourite musician’s discography.
The website will let the users filter their search based on playlists or artist profiles, and then give them more information about the type of music they are interested in. This is a prototype of the website in question: https://bit.ly/3AaqaXS
4. Chukwudi Benjamin Ukonne
Chukwudi wants to write a long-form visual essay that analyses lyrical content from the top-selling Nigerian records each year in the last decade (2012–2022). His goals come in two folds:
- What is the anatomy of a Nigerian hit song?
- What inferences can we draw from the music we gravitate towards? Can music be an accurate barometer of the sociopolitical temperature of a given time period?
He has previously worked on ‘Ojukokoro showcases greed and the nigerian dream perfectly’, for Culture Custodian.
Kickoff
We met with the artists on Tuesday, and Opemipo led the conversation.
He talked about the project and where the idea to run a contest came from. Then he explained how wuruwuru works and the standard we’re trying to set. All four contestants said they already follow wuruwuru, and are interested in how and why we do the things we do.
We took a moment to read through the documentation, and then the artists took turns talking through their ideas and how they plan to achieve them.
We agreed that wuruwuru will draft an operations plan for the projects and set up a call next week to review it. It was a really good call, and it was nice to meet everyone.
