The Fall’s album cover art staged a deliberate aesthetic war with prog rock

Evidence

By the time of Grotesque (After the Gramme), the Fall’s pulp modernism has become an entire political-aesthetic program. At one level, Grotesque can be positioned as the barbed Prole Art retort to the lyric antique Englishness of public school prog. Compare, for instance, the cover of “City Hobgoblins” (one of the singles that came out around the time of Grotesque) with something like Genesis’ Nursery Cryme. Nursery Cryme presents a gently corrupted English surrealist idyll. On the “City Hobgoblins” cover, an urban scene has been invaded by “emigres from old green glades”: a leering, malevolent cobold looms over a dilapidated tenement. But rather than being smoothly integrated into the photographed scene, the crudely rendered hobgoblin has been etched, Nigel Cooke-style, onto the background. This is a war of worlds, an ontological struggle, a struggle over the means of representation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1129

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘struggle over the means of representation’ echoes Fisher’s recurring theme that aesthetics is political territory — connects to his famous critique of capitalist realism elsewhere. — connects to: The Fall made bass the lead instrument and inverted white-rock values — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1107; Joy Division and the Fall represent opposite ends of Romantic modernism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1108