When deciding whether or not to ban a publication the official apartheid-era state censor, the Directorate of Publications, would consider whether or not it was ‘undesirable’. Over the decades the Directorate declared thousands of publications undesirable. These included approximately 100 music albums, some of which were found to be undesirable wholly or partly because of their record covers. Although these decisions about album covers are in themselves interesting, my focus is not exclusively on government censorship decisions. For it was not only government censors who had an interest in the desirable: when deciding how to present their music to potential consumers, musicians and/or their record companies chose covers with which they wanted to associate themselves and their music. In this sense they too had an interest in the desirable, specifically in desirable marketing images.

Using the idea of ‘packaging desires’, I explore a variety of record cover images used by musicians and record companies during the apartheid era. I consider the ways in which race, ethnicity, sex, and gender were often integrally presented on album covers in a manner which reinforced a racist, ethnocentric, sexist, and heterosexist view of South African society. It is argued that record covers promoted apartheid hegemony in two ways: first, through the promotion of dominant ideas and second, through the omission of dissenting ideas, as a result of censors who, and threat of censorial action which, policed the boundaries of the dominant discourse, ensuring that the undesirable remained unseen. The prevalence of album cover images which either actively promoted or simply did not challenge the dominant apartheid discourse contributed towards a context in which South Africans were not encouraged to question the dominant order and were less likely to encounter alternatives.

Packaging music: The art of the album cover

Much sociological and musicological discussion of popular music focuses on the lyrics or music itself. Far less attention is paid to the album covers within which the music is packaged as part of a marketing strategy. Yet Brian Griffin, one of Britain's most prolific rock photographers of the 1980s, emphasises the importance of album covers as a medium. His comments are particularly apt for the 1960s to 1980s pre-compact disc context, when long playing records were the most popular format for recordings (and the period under discussion here).