The White Stripes’ red-white-and-black self-branding is so ingrained in the public consciousness that it is hard to remember a time when they weren’t global superstars.
By the time they released Elephant on 1 April 2003 they were household names. Their critical and commercial appeal reached its highest point with that release.
Such popularity allowed them more freedom with their releases and they produced no less than six different sleeves for Elephant for CD and LP releases across the world.
Some of the sleeve variations were bigger than others.
On the US CD edition, Meg White is sitting on the left of a circus travel trunk and Jack is sitting on the right holding a cricket bat over the ground.
The UK CD edition sees the cricket bat touching the ground and the image is mirrored so that their positions on the amplifier are reversed.
The UK vinyl album cover is the same as the US CD but differs in that the colour hues are much darker.
At this point in their career, the ever-symbolism-keen Jack White took the band’s look up a notch.
The album art includes a skull sitting on the floor in the background, as well as peanuts and peanut shells in the foreground.
On the circus travel trunk appears the mark “III,” Jack White’s signature.
The sleeve also sees them dressed as Grand Ole Opry-style sweethearts. Jack White is displaying a mano cornuta and looking at a light bulb intensely. Meg White is barefoot and appears to be crying, with a rope tied around her ankle and leading out of frame. Both have small white ribbons tied to their fingers. Books could be written analysing all this stuff.
The title was chosen because of the way in which the Stripes perceived the animal: noble, mating for life, and only attacking you if you threatened the young.
White later went on to say of the sleeve: “If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it’s a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side.
I wanted people to be staring at this album cover and then maybe two years later, having stared at it for the 500th time, to say, ‘Hey, it’s an elephant!’”
Facebook Comments