Abstract
Although the images on the front of album covers contribute to a multimodal experience of popular music, they have up until now rarely been used as a historiographical source. This article aims to add this visual dimension to the historiography of popular music in the GDR by investigating visual patterns within a corpus of 105 album covers produced in the German Democratic Republic between 1964 and 1990 and by comparing them to Western album covers from the same period. Following a theoretical introduction, the political, economic and technological contexts of record production and album cover design in the GDR are described. Inspired by visual discourse analysis and social semiotics, a comparative corpus analysis approach focuses on the depiction of persons, settings and objects on the album covers as well as on their general visual design. The results suggest both a specific visual language that is peculiar to album covers in the GDR and an encompassing transnational imagery of popular music.
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