What does it mean to lean? Several R&B artists this year are giving a comfortably relaxed nod to a tradition that dates back decades: Soul singers stretching out placidly and invitingly on their album covers. The year isn’t even half over yet, and new releases by Eric Bellinger, Durand Bernarr, and Ari Lennox, among others, depict the artists each reclining on their album covers just like Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, and, of course, Michael Jackson did in the Eighties.
Bellinger, who recently put out the heart-on-sleeve slow jam “Cry in Front of You,” spotted the coincidence early and leaned into it on social media. “Great minds think alike,” he wrote in an Instagram post. He accompanied the observation with a photo showing the sleeve of his upcoming self-titled album, slated to arrive this summer, on a grid alongside Bernarr’s and Thriller.
“With this project being my self-titled album, I knew it was important to do something classic for the cover,” he tells Rolling Stone via email. “I tapped into a much more personal and vulnerable approach this time around, so my first thought was to channel the energy from the greats like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Luther Vandross, and Teddy Pendergrass to bring back the legendary LEAN.”
The pose has been a go-to look for R&B singers since at least Aretha Franklin’s 1979 LP, La Diva, and Teddy Pendergrass followed suit with an extra sexy look on his face on the cover of his 1981 album, It’s Time for Love. Lennox perfectly approximates Franklin’s confidence and repose on the cover of her latest album, Vacancy.
But of course it was Michael Jackson’s Thriller that made the look iconic the following year. Dick Zimmerman, Thriller’s cover photographer, has said that the whole shoot took six or seven hours and began in earnest when Jackson asked to wear his white suit (echoing Pendergrass); then they just played around with poses, and a tiger cub. Eventually, Quincy Jones picked the cover shot.
More and more lookalikes followed suit in the next few years. Richie did his own lean on the cover of his “You Are” 7-inch in 1982, Finis Henderson III skipped to the lou with an old-timey microphone as a prop on the cover of 1983’s Finis, and Vandross gave it a go on Give Me the Reason in 1986. But the trend faded out by the end of the Eighties.
When Bellinger discovered he was part of a leaning tower of song this year, his first impulse was to shoot a new cover. “But as I prayed on it and thought more about it, I remembered my original inspiration was a greatness that all of us are chasing,” he says. “And I started to feel the likeminded connectivity and resurgence amongst the gentlemen in R&B and honestly felt like it was necessary to just release mine to the world and let them decide. I was shocked to see the people rally behind me and support my original idea to KEEP THE LEAN!”
On Bernarr’s funky new single, “Am I Okay?!,” he sings, “For a small piece of your time, I’ll pay a fee/Just to sit here on this couch and bare my soul.” But on the cover of Benarr., he’s not sitting, he’s leaning. He tells Rolling Stone he found the coincidence of other artists with the same swagger amusing. “Funny thing about Eric, we ran into each other a couple weeks before the drop and he told me he did the lean, also,” he says via email. “I encouraged him to still go with his vision because it’s almost a rite of passage to lean on your album cover at LEAST once!
“2026 is absolutely the Year of the (shoulder) LEAN!” he added.
Photographer Juan Veloz, who shot Bernarr’s sleeve, says his goal was to emulate the classics, naming Jackson’s, Vandross’, and Richie’s sleeves as inspiration. “The moment we saw that lean pose, we knew the album was going to be iconic!” he says. “We took the inspiration and made it our own, from the styling to the set design to the lighting to capturing the true essence of Durand.”
The origins of the pose, at least as it relates to Thriller, came under discussion recently as the internet discovered the 1982 self-titled debut album by R&B artist Alfonzo Jones, a singer with a Michael Jackson–like voice who ostensibly put out his self-titled debut months before Thriller with a sleeve that showed him leaning. But Jones, who says the pose came about organically, and others agreed the similarities were likely a coincidence.
Questlove, who spoke with Rolling Stone about Alfonzo, offered a theory about why the look was so popular. “Luther, Lionel, and Teddy Pendergrass and what not, maybe laying on the floor was just the ‘serious pose,’” Questlove told Rolling Stone for the feature. “I did a lot of research on the Thriller cover, and I was told that Michael’s Thriller pose was almost an afterthought.… Laying down was more about accommodating the tiger that Michael wanted to include on the cover.”
“Alfonzo could have been influenced by my cover image, but after 44 years I have a feeling that Thriller has outlived many additional similarities visually and musically and perhaps will outlive any other plagiaristic imitations in the future!” Zimmerman told Rolling Stone.
