Slog

A famous album cover:
In his collection of essays, Small Acts, Paul Gilroy (the leading black intellectual of the 90s) writes:

In Britain…[Hendrix’s], portrait was banished to the interior of the Electric Ladyland sleeve by David King’s celebrated photograph of nineteen naked women. Eighteen of them are ‘white’: a lone woman sits vacantly in the right mid-ground, offering a striking image of Hendrix’s own displacement and isolation [in the UK] .

That is the main meaning and power of the image. The black woman is isolated, an island, a stranger in a strange ladyland.

30 years after the photo was taken by King, 1968, another photographer duplicates it for the music magazine Q. The image in this case has little power and meaning because the black woman is gone and Moby, a big star at the time, is in it. Not only is he in it, he is unbelievably disinterested in the women. Moby’s disinterest seems to say that the original had no meaning outside of this: nineteen naked and bored women are posing for a photographer. Hendrix is iced by Moby.

In 2004, an Italian rock star, Zucchero (which means “sugar”) remakes the image, and though he returns the single black women to her lonely place, he, like Moby, places himself inside of the image. Whereas the original image was about a strange land of women, this image is about a king, Zucchero, in the happy land of his women.