PULP WAVE (10)

By: Charles Leech
December 20, 2022

We are pleased to present a 10-part series, by Canadian semiotician and HILOBROW friend Charles Leech, sampling the recombinant artwork that he sells via his Etsy shop RecombinantCulture.

An REM track from 1986’s Life’s Rich Pageant. I’d always loved the weary cynicism of ‘here’s the progress: we have found a way to talk around the problem’, but that proved very difficult to visualize in a cover. Although Stipe now demurs on the issue, the origin of the song was about acid rain, and the growing environmental concern about it (and the depletion of the ozone layer) prevalent in the mid-80s.

So, I went hunting for acid rain, the-sky-is-falling paperback covers, and quickly found this marvellous cover by Irving Freeman and Mark Rubin for the first edition of John Brunner’s sci-fi classic ‘The Sheep Look Up’. It’s a dystopian, post-apocalyptic story of environmental chaos, including polluted oceans, air — and acid rain. Highly poisonous acid rain. Don’t fall on me? Eh, it’s hard rain: it’s gonna fall.

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PULP WAVE (10)

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