A favorite album cover of mine from the last decade or so has been that for Lovage’s Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By. Sure, kitschy retro covers are a dime a dozen, but there was a fine attention to detail and dark wit to the packaging for Automator’s collaboration with Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles. The cover suits a hip-hop noir torch album that claimed to be a musical aphrodisiac while actually being a suite of cynical tracks satirizing the ugly side of love and lust. Automator, in his fake-mustachioed “Nathaniel Merriweather” guise from Handsome Boy Modeling School (both names are Chris Elliott homages), sits before a black backdrop at a table, impeccably dressed and sunglassed as he expectantly smokes a cigarette. On the table sit a bouquet of red roses and a handgun, romance and murder drolly juxtaposed.

The humorous and knowingly sleazy impulses of Lovage were heavily influenced by the legendary creep lothario of France, Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg is a buzzy dead guy at the moment, with a sexy daughter making albums with Jarvis Cocker and Air and appearing in movies by Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Lars Von Trier (she certainly inherited her dad’s talent for networking), a biopic in the works, and a North American re-issue for his pedariffic concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. The cover for Melody proves Gainsbourg was no slouch in the album image arena. The topless nymphet covering herself with a teddy bear against a soft blue backdrop says everything one really needs to know about the story.

Imagine, then, my surprised leavened with “oh…well that makes complete fcuking sense” when, dicking around with my Amazon wish list and recommendations this morning, I found out the Lovage cover was borrowed directly from Serge’s No. 2. My first instinct was disappointment, but that didn’t last long. I still love the Lovage cover and think the Serge template was a canny pick and good indication of the inspiration for such a dark love cartoon. It is an experience I have over and over again with hip hop when I discover the sources, and my responses vary. Either I am impressed with how a previous work was interpolated into something new, or my admiration for the track deflates when I realize how much was copped.

Can anybody relate to this experience? Did any appropriations of the past ruin a work for you when you became aware of them? Did you ever figure out a sample only to be surprised at how well the artist updated or re-invented the source? How big a role should homage or thievery play in pop art? Isn’t the best outcome of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the unhinged majesty that is Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money (the rare direct visual and aural parody that winds up much better that it’s template)?