I can’t remember how, or why, I became interested in Richard Prince’s record cover art. I was a fan of Sonic Youth and saw them live at Hultsfreds Festival in 2002. I already owned the Ciccione Youth Burnin’ Up 12″ and Perhaps it was through listening to Sonic Youth and then buying the Sonic Nurse album that introduced me to his art.

Richard Prince was born on 6th August 1949, 21 years to the day after Andy Warhol. He grew up fascinated by Jackson Pollock’s art and that hinted to him that it might be possible to make a living as an artist. The coincidence of Price’s birthday is not the only similarity to Warhol’s art. Like Warhol, Prince has used appropriated images from adverts (his Cowboy series) and photographs. He started by rephotographing pictures and, working for a time at Time Magazine and had his first solo exhbition in 1980 and has had many later exhibitions at prestigious galleries and museums including the Guggenheim (2007).

Like Andy Warhol before him, Prince began appropriating advertisments for his art. He made a series of Cowboy paintings based on the Marlboro Man adverts. And like Warhol, who was sued by Patricia Caulfield for appropriating her photograph of hibiscus flowers for his Flowers paintings and prints, Prince (together with the Gagosian Gallery and Lawrence Gagosian) was sued by photographer Patrick Cariou whose photographs he had appropriated for a series of paintings shown at the Gagosian Gallery. Emily Ratajkowski, another photographer, used a different method to get retribution for Prince appropriating one of her Instagram posts. She photographed herself in front of Prince’s painting and made an NFT of the image that sold at Christies, New York, for $175,000!

In 1985 Prince recorded his composition Loud Song onto a cassette tape and then rerecorded it onto a second cassette. Prince described the process thus: “Loud Song was recorded in Venice Beach California in a house that I rented in the winter of 1985.
I recorded the song on an electric keyboard.
I used two cassette tape recorders.
I Would play the keyboard and record what was played on the first cassette.
Then I would play what I recorded and play more keyboard and record both sounds on the second cassette.
Then I would play back what I recorded on the second cassette and play more keyboard and record all that onto the first cassette.
It was like I was using the cassette players as musicians.
I would record this way until the song got really loud.”

Kim Gordon painted the cover picture and a limited edition of 250 copies, signed by Prince, was published by 303 Gallery.

There is also a 7″ version released in a limited edition by Eric Doeringer that has Loud Song as its A-side and two tracks, Catherine and My Way, by Doeringer on the B-side. I also feel that the cover is Doeringer’s re-imagination of Kim Gordon’s original painting. Doeringer took the Loud Song track from Richard Prince’s Loud Song CD.

Eric Doeringer is an artist living in Los Angeles, who often appropriates other artists’ works in his art. Many of them, including Richard Prince, have applauded his work, while others have treatened him with legal action to stop him using their work.

I found a further version of Loud Song when, in 2022, I bought Richard Prince’s High Times book. Inside was a single-sided, green flexidisc version released in 2018.

There is also a Loud Song CD that I haven’t managed to find. I’m primarily interested in vinyl so I probably won’t go after the CD.

The next record produced by Richard Prince was Good Revolution / Don’t Belong, a limited edition artwork published in 1992 in an edition of 80 copies. These were presentation gold seven-inch records with an engraved plaque mounted on a C-print, framed, includes a playable black vinyl record by the artist, recorded both sides, “Good Revolution” (1:46) and “Don’t Belong” (1:46), arranged and performed by Richard Prince, recorded and mixed at Harmonic Ranch by Mark Degliantoni, September 1992 (20 1/2 × 16 1/2 × 1 1/2 in | 52.1 × 41.9 × 3.8 cm).

A Tribe Called Quest released their final album, We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service, in 2017 with cover art bt Richard Prince. Prince’s design harked back to the. femail form on earlier ATCQ albums, althoiugh, to my eyes the figure looks more masculine. The coloration would be repeated in the nine covers Prince produced for his Gagosian exhibiition in 2022 (see below).

In 2018, Prince released a single-sided, 12-inch picture disc in conjunction with the Brigade Commerz Gallery entitled It’s a Free Concert Now. There was a limited “Artist’s” edition of twenty-five signed copies and a further unsigned edition, also of 25 copies. Mine, I think, is the unsigned edition (it’s still sticker-sealed, so I haven’t been able to see the B-side where Prince’s signature would be.)

Then in 2022 Prince designed a series of nine record covers that were really just artworks. Each cover contained a random 12″ record. I haven’t been able to establish whether or not these were a limited edition. The covers were part of a Richard Prince exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Burlingtin Arcade, London, and apparently sold for £30 each. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to get any.

The final, and most recent, Richard Prince cover is his reimagining of the Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral album, commissioned by Interscope Records as part of the company’s 2023 thirtieth anniversay set of reissues. I’ve described the twelve Damien Hirst covers in this series in a previous post. Richard Prince only got to reimagine this one cover. It is available in two versions: a picture disc, double LP, in a sngle pocket cover in an edition of 500 copies and a 100 copy, deluxe black vinyl version in a gatefold cover packaged in Gucci packeting. Needless to say, I could only stretch to the picture disc version (I can survvive without the Gucci packaging.)

These are all the Richard Prince covers I have found so far. I’m sure there may be more. I’ll keep you posted.