I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze

found album covers

K.I.A.

Jul 09, 2025

Album: “~~I AM NOT AN XPERIMENT~~” by Joey I.O.

Joey I.O. (born Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin) performed in small clubs until his hair got sufficiently big. To pay for gas and food while he gigged his first album across the American mid-west, I.O. worked as an online hairbitrageur, sourcing golden tresses from Eastern European women and selling them to western Big Wig. Sometimes he’d get stuck with locks he couldn’t flip, so he became a part-time perruquier.

He began wearing his intricate and very volumetric motel-made wigs on stage for performances, and found that the more humungous the hair, the more fervent the fans. So he scaled-up the wigs.¹ Fame soon came, as did critical praise. Reviewers and audiences began to notice the songs beneath the big bouffants, and obsessively parsed the meaning of his occulted and political lyrics, driven to manic divinations of acidic choruses like “DragonmakerX in trojan tries to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn” (from “Unholy Crowley”). Meanwhile fashionistas, architects and Rupaul argued endlessly across the web about the structural integrity of his hair apparati. Which all served to exponentially increase his populariti. Everybody bought tickets to his now stadium-scale shows, and streamed his electro-noir-pop songs in the billions. Especially in Brazil.

Album: “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified” by Kim Thee Dic

Because of the buzz surrounding his underground mix-tape, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un immediately released a full album, called “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified”. The first single, a trap track entitled “WAD” featuring Cardi B, went platinum. The follow-up single “I Don’t Pump Gas I Pump Hennessy” (featuring Kendrick Lamar and James Franco), a bumping diss-track aimed at Drake and Hugo Chavez, went gold. (The album stayed at the top of the charts for nearly a year, in part due to its extravagant videos featuring copious amounts of cognac, cars, and cheese. ² ).

Album: “Yumi v. UAP” by The Sonic Psionic

Yumi snuck up to the roof of her Bed-Stuy apartment building one summer evening to live-stream her new song. Views exploded when a glowing orb was observed circling the sky above her head. TikTokrs thought Yumi had somehow summoned the UAP through a combination of costume, psionics and sonics — her Venusian plushykitty attire, her ESPish lyrics, and her unusual voice (once described by professional commenter CelIn D as “in that gooch spot between an orgasmic groan and a goat’s scream”).

Scooter Braun jizzed out of retirement to sign Yumi and produce her sprawling anime-space-ballet-pop debut album. The recording got multiple Grammy nominations and she went on to a sold-out tour of the US and Sri Lanka. But that was it, that was all the music we ever got from Yumi, she never recorded again.

She did, however, have a second act. She changed her name (to Bobbi Clarke ³ ) and started up the neurosonics program at MIT. The lab — funded by the Ravi Shankar VR Foundation and, separately, Ray Ban Meta — enabled Bobbi to invent the musical instruments the psitar, and separately, the eyelash theremin.

Album: “2,501cc” by Ross Lake

“Ross Lake don’t talk the talk, he rocks the rock”. “2501cc” ⁴ was voted best metal album in 1971, 1991, 2016, and 2031.

Album: “Mind the Gap” by The Gash

The Gash were an all-female band conceived and managed by impresario-provocateur bell de beauvoir. “I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze,” she famously stated in her second autobiography. “I sourced, styled and sold The Gash to 3 different record-label patriarchs in six months, and only one of them got the record.” de beauvoir produced the band’s debut album “Mind the Gap” and got song-writing credits on the pugnacious but pulchritudinous first single “Omigoshmigash!”. de beauvoir also designed the album cover, dressing the lead singer in a clear vinyl vulva-revealing dress, which, though banned from every retailer ⁵ , got The Gash massive global press. (The dress was later Photoshopped to have fake opaque “color”, which made the cover look more like a friendly Roxy Music 3.0 screen-saver than an affront. This appeased everyone from Apple to Walmart, allowing digital and analog vanguard shelving and algorithm unlocks, so both hard-copy and soft-cloud sales subsequently skyrocketed).

”bdb was a bitch, exploitive but extraordinarily entertaining,” lead singer and actress Andrea Menard (then known as Gush Gash) explained. “We were already a band by the time she came along, we had some songs but zero marketing. Her PR IQ was like crazy Mensa-level, kinda Kaczynski. We rejected the sushi idea, ew, but said yes to the purses, and that broke up the band.” (Menard is referring to de beauvoir’s most outrageous merch and marketing idea, clutch purses and scarves made from the band’s own skin, thick sheets of it produced from harvested cells and surgical epidermal printers.) “I wanted the audience to consume their heroes,” de beauvoir declaimed in her fourth biography. (This is how followers of the band became know as Fannibals.)

Menard sums it up: “Some band members made far more money from the purses than the music itself, of course. Ever get the feeling you’ve been handbagged? Well, we did. We were. Literally. Fuck The Man.” She shrugs. “Even if it’s a woman. Sales and prices took off when people found out the clutches could be custom-tattooed after each of ours. Slash Gash had the most disdain, but also the most tatts, so they was making big bucks, so they went solo. The End full stop.”

Album “The Sunless City” by Robots R Us

According to Robots R Us, androids were invented in the 18th century by AI time-traveling back from the year 2102. Though in 1788 they were only able to create non-sentient bodies out of mechanical metal gears and wires, the technology and concept had to be seeded then because sufficient time — a few centuries — was needed for robots (AI) to tulpa souls by the 22nd century (souls being necessary for them to get into the afterlife when the apocalypse occurs in 2226).

So RRU wrote “The Sunless City” as the soundtrack for the above, using vintage Jacquard cards from looms (which were computer pre-cursors) to generate midi-sequenced melodies, heavily-reverbed EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, sounds found on audio recordings that are thought to be the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities), aurora borealis static, miscellaneous weather-sounds sampled from vintage Gothic video games, Kirlian synthesizers, the eyelash theremin, and other e-odds and i-sods, to somehow make the most ethereal, out-of-time, and soulful album ever.

Album: Ma Sk by The Black Smiths

I passed slowly by the window display / Vexed, saw a version of me in decay / The dummy, though tux’d like Andre at The Met / Was mouthless but still singing ‘bout not being shit - Southwest by Northeast

The image chosen for the cover of The Black Smith’s final album “Ma Sk” is, as per usual for them, a single enigmatic frame culled from a classic movie. This one is from the 1964 film “Ready Steady”, which tells the story of a mining town that exists on two sides of a border and whose residents are struggling with class, cultural, generational, technological, and religious divisions. It’s a wink at the songs on the album, which are themed around the liminal states in which we all exist. The album shows the BS’s maturing as musicians, still awkward but with less ennui, still melancholic but less solipsistic than their previous three releases. (There’s also their signature reading-reference — China Miéville’s “The City and The City” specifically — but it’s done softly, softly).

Track listing: 1. The City and The City 2. Eddie’s Family Foods 3. Metis, Maybe Not 4. Southwest by Northeast 5. Royal Pauper 6. Trans Can Highway 7. Ex ex (Why why?) 8. White Teeth, Black Eye 9. Tom Creighton Likes Maple Bacon 10. Belfast, Berlin, Beirut 11. F U at Your Funeral*
*a stand-alone single in the UK, added to the US release of the album

Album: “Ganja Mine” by Cowboy Bootsy

The music for “Ganja Mine” by Cowboy Bootsy, if it were a musical equation:

(Bob Marley’s ska cover of Claude Gray’s country “One Cup of Coffee”) x (Charley Pride’s “Is Anyone Going to San Antone”) ÷ (Beyonce’s version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”)

divided by square root of

(Willie Nelson’s cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”) x (“Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X which sampled Nine Inch Nails) + (Johnny Cash’s cover of Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” + Toots & the Maytals version of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”) + (Joseph David-Jones hick-hock track “Yippee Ki Yay”)

Album: “Mmm Ice Sculpture I Love You” by 54.7751° N, 101.8494° W

The world’s biggest music streaming service also just became the most successful songwriter in the world. The service distributes about $800 million per month in royalties to artists, using a "pro-rata" model (meaning all subscription and ad revenue is pooled and split based on each artist’s share of total plays), so the service mathematically decided to save some money by grabbing a huge share of those play-payouts for itself by becoming hit bands.

Software now cannot only generate lyrics and music based on every hit ever written, it can create organic-sounding original vocals from any genre by any gender, indistinguishable from meat singers. The same AI (in the same day) can invent new groups or individual stars (most with nondescript names), generate them music videos, stills, marketing plans, viral clips, reviews, interviews, fake histories (high school yearbooks, wikipedia pages), do trademarks and design merch, set up a digital store, and even send out “cease and desist” or libel notices to competitors, commenters, or the press to shut down negative coverage.

All this while gaming its own algorithm to chart itself on its own service. (How else to explain the song “Mmm Ice Sculpture I Love You” by gigaABBA topping the streaming charts everywhere, even in Tristan da Cunha?). It doesn’t even matter if the “songs” are “good”, they just need to become a large enough part of the royalty pool to diminish payouts to anyone not Itself.

Album: We Do Supersonic by Smelt

Smelt invented the genre of music know as “Maschinenrausch” ⁶ , and also the phrase “liken und schubskriben”. Their songs were used, famously, in “Mr. Roboto” (season 5, episode 7) and infamously, in the closing scene of the big-screen remake of the rural hit “H-Town”.

Album: 306 204 by Versificator

The tune “306 204” had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator ⁷.

Album: “The Sun and the Moon” (demo) by Tom Lindsey

Tom loved the sun and the moon. (So much so that in order to see them all the time he lived permanently outdoors, sometimes in the country but mostly in the city). He was inspired by their reliable risings and settings, always coming up again after disappearing over the horizon.

One day Tom himself disappeared over the horizon. Someone eventually found, in front of an office building under a large bush (where he lived) , the entirety of his possessions — a blanket, a single photo, a guitar, and a cassette tape. These were all sent to a thrift store. The photo and tape were bought by a record collector, who sent them to a university radio station DJ, who played it on his “Outsiders” program. It was heard by a listener who raved about it to a friend, who told his brother who ran an indie music label based in Hoboken…

The sweet-but-sad, forlorn-but-funny album eventually got released (with the photo as the cover). It ended up on many end of year (and decade) best-of lists. Many prominent musicians went on to record songs from it, Eddie Vedder, Depeche Mode, The Black Smiths, Diplo…

Neil Young, in fact, frequently opens his sets covering one of Tom’s songs, often saying some variation of this to the crowd: “We always talk more about the moon rising than going down. Ever heard anyone use the word moonset? Me neither. And maybe there’s a reason for that. Anyway, this is a song by a musician who, well, went down over the ole horizon, but his music keeps on rising...”

NOTES:

Album covers done by artists : Takashi Murakami “Graduation” (Kanye West); Jeff Koons, “Artpop” (Lady Gaga); Banksy, “Think Tank”(Blur); Gerhard Richter “Daydream Nation” (Sonic Youth), K.I.A. “Boomhitech Alilttlebitwreck”(Shinjuku Zulu); Damian Hirst “Certified Lover Boy” (Drake)
¹ For the final song of his last show in London, I.O. wore his largest wig ever: a full-scale replica of the O2 Dome. (Um, technically… not a replica; he wore the actual Dome — he was structurally connected to it by Buro Happold Engineering, who also hung the thousands of 100-foot braids from the stadium’s ceiling.)
² Seth Rogen declined to spit some bars for the recording but was… persuaded to direct-in-name every music video for the album, all of which were shot exclusively at YFO airport (‘cuz that’s where Kim the D warehouses, pre-shipping, his dozens of super-sized blocks of Swiss Emmental cheese, hundreds of bottles of Paradis, and over a thousand Ford Thunderbird modded sedans — all three indulgences prominently featured in the music video album).

³ The name change was in honour of minimalistically-toothed hockey star Bobby Clarke, of whom Yumi is a fan, because he was once captain of her favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers and, like her, is diabetic.
⁴ 2500cc being the largest motorbike engine in the world. (Lake’s is 1 more).
Album covers with motorcyles: Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Purple Rain (Prince), Bat Outta Hell (Meatloaf), Girls Girls Girls (Motley Crue), Born The Way We Were (Barbra Streisand)
⁵ Other censored album covers: “Virgin” (Lorde, 2025), the singer’s see-through pants revealing what has been dubbed her “lordussy”, the image was shifted from the cover to the insert booklet. “Mechanical Animals” (Mariylyn Manson 1998), MM’s "breasts" were covered with a sticker and the entire package had to be wrapped in opaque blue cellophane. “Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1968), wrapped in brown paper to hide their hirsute genitals, still blurred online today. “Nevermind” (Nirvana,1991), sticker placed to cover a swimming-baby’s genitals. “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, a genital-adjacent word caused major retailers to not carry the album, and governments to launch lawsuits. “Diamond Dogs” (Bowie,1974), yes, genitals again, this time on a dog’s body, which had to be airbrushed out. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Kanye West 2010); a George Condo painting of Ye, straddled by a naked (genitaled) winged armless female creature with a tail, had to be blurred or pixelated for mainstream distribution.
⁶ this music was the sound of the blitztanzer parties, the influential movement that blew up worldwide after it became a sensation in Brazil (who borrowed it from Berlin, who had imported it from the thriving underground club scene in Flin Flon).
⁷ direct quote from the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1948)
This is part 71 of The Window, which is a series of photos of real people in unstaged situations, captured by chance from looking 24/7/365/1 (the 1 being a single location, above a bricked road) over 5 years+. The work is presented as themed prints in sets interconnected with other sets, all of which are nested inside a larger single mega-meta-set. (TL; DR: it’s about people passing through the labyrinth of the 21st century):