Identity through Covers

Today, I have been to Virgin Megastore at Landmark where all the awesome music and video games can be found. One thing that grabbed my attention was how each music genre has a way to express its music theme through CD Album covers. An example would be rock music . This type of music culture has many prominent and district features in its CD covers. The overall look of such covers is sort of gothic with skulls and people screaming and all. However, we can also see that rock music is divided into many subcultures such as metal, hard, emo and alternative. Each division has its own way of presenting its music and the overall look. I am honestly not suprised at how the identity fluidity had increased in the past couple of years given how music from all types of cultures is sold everywhere.

One of the interesting rock genres that should be touched upon is emo rock. Emo rock bands try to express their sorrowful way of life through singing. The emo fashion is getting more and more widespread especially these days. The performers usually have lengthy dark hair, with highlights, covering their eyes and wear tight fitted jeans. And whether the performer is a girl or a boy, the makeup is all over their faces. I think it is pretty interesting that this sort of subculture has local, translocal and virtual scenes almost everywhere in the world. Although emo is not very accepted in the middle east, there are some concerts that occur in Dubai in the “Dubai Rock Festival.” Below is a self-explanatory video of how emo people act and dress

Anyways, so back to Virgin, my friend showed me one pretty interesting thing. The cover of the Transformers Collector’s edition has the regular Optimus Prime character icon on it. However, when you flip the cover upside down, you can see Darth Vader from Star Wars. This is a very impressive form of product placement. Although the producers of the Transformers and the Star Wars movie franchise are not the same, this indirect form of advertisement happened. I find it amusing that companies find these indirect ways of advertising. This is much more interesting than watching a movie trailer about Star Wars on TV. This is mainly because people hate watching advertisements especially while they are watching their favorite TV series. It sort of feels like we are being interrupted somehow.