 The video you're about to watch is an episode of Cover Stories, my ongoing series celebrating the incredible artistic medium that is the Album Cover. Most of the rest of this series can be found on YouTube, but not all album artwork complies with this platform's policies on discussing things like war and violence. So if you're hungry for a more radical episode of Cover Stories, you can head over to Nebula with the link in the description and watch an exclusive episode on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album. And if you already support me on Nebula, I want to give a big thanks. It genuinely helps me pay the bills and continues to do this as my full-time job. Alright, now let's get on to the video. In the early 1970s, Prog Rock was reaching a zenith. Bands like Yes, Genesis, and King Crimson were releasing enormously ambitious projects. They wove intricate mythologies through elaborate side-spanning songs and paired them with album artworks that were just as surreal, depicting other worlds and magical landscapes. One of the defining albums of this era was Jethro Tull's Aqualung, a rich concept album that meditated on religion and suffering. Or at least, that's what the critics said. This came as some surprise to the man who wrote the album, Ian Anderson, because Anderson didn't think of it as a concept album at all. In fact, he was so annoyed by this label that he did what any rational prog front man would do. He decided to write The Mother of All Concept Albums to show the critics what a real concept album looked like. Two years after Aqualung, Jethro Tull released Thick as a Brick, an enormous concept album consisting of a single 43-minute song in which Anderson satirizes his own peers in the Prog Rock scene and skewers the grandiose ambitions of the genre. Anderson had a vision of pairing this elaborate concept with an equally elaborate and equally satirical piece of album artwork. He wanted to wrap his masterpiece in a fully realized newspaper parody. At first, Jethro Tull's label rejected the idea, deeming it too expensive. But Anderson insisted, saying that if newspapers could print an edition every day without being too expensive, surely Tull could make a single newspaper work. So the band and their collaborators sat down and set about creating some of the most incredible album packaging ever made. Welcome to Cover Stories. Jethro Tull weren't the first artist to have the idea of a newspaper-themed album. In 1969, Jefferson Airplane styled volunteers after a newspaper and included a crossword and comic on the back cover. A year earlier, the Four Seasons had gone even more elaborate with their genuine imitation Life Gazette, which featured a number of articles, photographs, and even fake ads. But Thick as a Brick blew both of these albums out of the water. The ambitious design pushed the boundaries of the record sleeve, adding an extended gatefold that let the album open up into a full-size newspaper, while simultaneously serving as the sleeve for the record itself. This whole piece is yet another example of a work of art that's lost when condensed into a simple jpeg on a streaming site. It's a piece of artwork filled with so much love and joy, yet a piece that's simultaneously spitting and sardonic. Jethro Tull loved to walk the line between celebrating and satirizing Prog Rock, and that tightrope act is abundantly clear in the packaging of Thick as a Brick. The main narrative of the newspaper focuses on a fictional eight-year-old named Gerald Bostock, dubbed Little Milton when he writes an epic, prophetic poem about modern society. That poem is, of course, the lyrics to Thick as a Brick, printed in full on page seven. Within the mythos of this newspaper, Jethro Tull decided to write an album around Bostock's poem. The stories in the newspaper build on this mythos, telling that this poem won a prestigious prize only to have it revoked due to its scandalous nature. Bostock's poem, or rather Anderson's poem, is a tongue-in-cheek lash against an older conservative British society, laced with witty observations about the strange reality that is coming of age, and it's also a loving poke at Anderson's Prog Rock peers. And while plenty of newsprint is devoted to building out this story, the newspaper that Tull created for Thick as a Brick has so much more to enjoy. The whole thing is like an elaborate Monty Python sketch, pithy British satire paired with an absurdist surrealism that plays out through the newspaper's articles. You can see the sensibility in pieces like non-rabbit missing, man through bottle, and local feud over kitchen window. A small paragraph announces that police are investigating the theft of 12 assorted dwarfs, four full-sized emperor penguins, a gnome in a fishing position, and two Tweety Bird baths. Another has a local magistrate finding himself to try to quit his smoking habit. But these articles are just the beginning. The album packaging features fake advertisements, TV and radio listings, horoscopes, and even a full classified section. There's an absurd recipe for a cake featuring dandelion stalks, whole orange peels, and oatmeal or custard powder. There's a crossword, several comics, a sports section, and of course, a lukewarm review of the record itself which concludes, this is a fine disc and a good example of the current pop scene attempting to break out of its vulgarisms and sometimes downright obscene derivative hogwash. And that's just scratching the surface of all there is behind this album cover. The band was meticulous in creating this newspaper. They populated it with photos of their crew and their friends and family while weaving a surreal image of a Britain caught in tumult and change. Tone managed to have their cake and eat it too. They create something that mirrors the epic scope and scale of any of the great prog albums that they're satirizing, and that loving ambition comes through in the elaborate packaging. Honestly, it's hard to comprehend just how perfectly executed this is as digital scans of the text are shockingly rare. In fact, most of the images I've used in this video are taken from my own personal copy of the record. And that's why Thick as a Brick stands as an argument for why physical media is important. Make no mistake, the music on the album is monumental in its own right, but the reality is that Thick as a Brick was always envisioned as more than a musical piece. It was a multimedia experiment, a clash of artistic forms and sensibilities that resulted in a truly unique media object. When Thick as a Brick dropped in 1972, Tull were reasonably nervous about its reception. They were worried that the Britishisms baked into it would fly over the heads of an American audience and make the album flop. As it turned out, they were dead wrong. The ambition of the album's packaging paired with the brilliance of the music to create a piece that was undeniably fascinating for fans of the exploding prog rock scene. Thick as a Brick topped Billboard's album charts and soared to a gold certification in the States. To this day, it's still remembered as one of the greatest albums of prog's first wave, even though it was parodying that entire movement. And beyond the success of the album, the packaging of Thick as a Brick has remained one of the most memorable in rock history. After Thick as a Brick, all sorts of artists would try their hands at the newspaper cover, but none landed quite like Jethro Tull. And that's because it's not just a clever picture to pair with the artwork. It's a stunning piece of interactive media, designed to be read and picked apart by fans while the music plays. It's an invitation to a strange little world created by Anderson and the rest of the band. And it's an eternal reminder that great art can still be made by those who don't take themselves so seriously.