Canadian Museum of Civilization

The Juno award-winning cover for Bruce Cockburn's Night Vision.

By Peter Simpson

Is the album cover doomed? Will digital music be the end of the pop-culture art form, and of the Juno Award for the best cover of the year?

These questions seem to hang in the air over a new Canadian Museum of Civilization exhibition of every winner of the Juno Award for album design, from Bruce Cockburn’s Night Vision in 1975 to last year’s winner from Broken Social Scene. The older winners are shown as record covers, which, at 12 inches by 12 inches, provide a suitable canvas for display, and are the size for which the form was perfected.

The more recent winners, and this year’s nominees (including Feist and Timber Timbre), however, are displayed as CDs, which are too small for the imagery and design on the cover to have any impact. Looking at a CD cover is like looking at a “thumbnail” copy of a larger photograph; you get the point, but not the punch.

There are exceptions, as always. The 2004 winner, Jann Arden’s Love Is the Only Soldier, is designed as a tattered letter, complete with stamp and postmark, so seeing it on a CD cover is effectively life-size. Ditto for the 2002 winner, Disparu from La Chicane, which is a page in a photo album, empty but for four corner tabs where a photo would have been. That empty page may be prescient, if the art form succumbs to the changing times.

CDs are dying, gradually but inexorably being pushed aside by cheaper and instantly available digital downloads, for which album covers are pointless. Eventually, as more and more music is sold digitally, the effort and costs of producing a meaningful, memorable album could make no economic sense.

There may be a saviour, though: the old way. Sales of music on vinyl remain a small part of the pie, but vinyl is the fastest growing segment of the music business, and has been for several years. Will it be enough to save the album cover as art form, and the Juno that goes with it? If not, we’ll never see such memorable covers as the 1981 winner, We Deliver, by the Downchild Blues Band, which looks like a pizza box and, when opened, reveals a full-sized photo of a cheesy pie.

Then again, we’d be spared covers such as 1979’s inexplicable winner from Madcats, which shows several oiled musclemen tearing a straitjacket off a howling model, and brings to mind Spinal Tap’s regrettable Smell the Glove. It would be better, as Tap’s Nigel Tufnel said, “not to know.”

The other half of the new exhibit on at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Celebrating the Junos: Photographs & Album Artwork, includes photographs from the annual awards gala, with mixed results. The images are more journalistic than great photographic art, although some successfully capture certain moments in time. There’s a 1981 photo of Joni Mitchell at the podium with Pierre Trudeau; only Canada puts politicians on stage during its national music awards, though why we do is unclear.

The best photos capture our biggest stars in passing moments: A young k.d. lang, in bridal gown and veil, poses backstage with an award, and Neil Young, the godfather of grunge, stands at the podium uncharacteristically dressed in a tuxedo. Buffy Sainte-Marie casually sits on a table at a news conference, showing a lot of leg. The Lovin’ Spoonful crowd into the frame for an impromptu group photo, and there’s a happy close-up of Shania Twain and Celine Dion together at the podium, two superstars from the Great White North set to conquer the world.

As for this year’s host Juno Awards city, there’s Ottawa content in the photos, if you know where to look. Alanis Morissette is there, and capital-girl Kathleen Edwards is onstage with Bryan Adams. In the final photo of the exhibition, from last year’s gala, the guitar player shown between Drake and Justin Bieber is Nepean, Ont.’s own Dan Kanter, who works and tours with Bieber.

Celebrating the Junos: Photographs & Album Artwork will be on display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization until April 9. The 2012 Juno Awards, hosted by William Shatner, will air live from Ottawa on April 1 at 8 p.m. on CTV.