Nuke Pop: Popular Culture Images of Nuclear War • Credits

Nuclear Record Jackets

Nuclear Record Jackets
Record cover showing mushroom cloud explosion with text, Basie, E = MC (squared) - Count Basie Orchestra, Neal Hefti Arrangements; Roulette label
The earliest record album to feature a mushroom cloud on the cover was not a rock album as you might suppose, but this Count Basie recording. The CD reissue has a more tasteful cover.
Record jacket with mushroom cloud and photo of band in the mushroom and text, Crown of Creation, Jefferson Airplane (RCA, Victor)
The most famous such rock record jacket art is from the Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation, whose photo credits claim that this is a picture of the Hiroshima bomb (though it seems actually to be from a September 14, 1957 Nevada test). The title song was inspired by a passage in a well-known postholocaust science fiction novel, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, in which the new, mutant generation is praised as superior to normal humans.
A nuclear cloud featured less prominently a year earlier on Grateful Dead.
Record jacket with illustration of the city of Sydney Australia next to huge craters as evidence of two large nuclear explosions.
Here the theme is strikingly used on the cover of an album featuring anti-nuclear songs, Red Sails in the Sunset, by Midnight Oil.
Record jacket with two scenes: top scene of mushroom cloud in background with people fleeing and text, Nuclear Assault - Game Over; bottom scene shows explosion and person in radiation suit with text, The Plague.
In the mid-eighties, nuclear war imagery became common in rock music videos. One student doing research for me reported that MTV was showing an average of one nuclear bomb image per hour.
This album by the “speed metal” group Nuclear Assault featured several songs dealing with nuclear war.

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