Think you're hot stuff for snagging an original pressing of a Sun Ra album? Feel like a true Afrofuturist connoisseur, holding a piece of cosmic history in your hands? Well, hold onto your tinfoil hats, because that "rare" album cover you're so proud of might just be a glorified kindergarten art project, courtesy of the maestro himself.

While Sun Ra is widely (and rightly) celebrated as an Afrofuturist pioneer who launched his own cosmic jazz into the stratosphere, an often-overlooked detail of his brilliance was his record label, El Saturn Records (or simply Saturn Records). Now, you might think "artist-owned label" sounds quaint, but in the late 1950s and 1960s, Saturn was doing something truly wild: it was one of the most active African American-owned labels in the entire United States. Take that, mainstream music industry!

But here's where it gets truly bizarre and wonderfully, uniquely Sun Ra: many of those early album covers weren't professionally printed masterpieces. Oh no. Sun Ra, or members of his Arkestra, would receive plain, blank sleeves from the pressing plant and then transform them into unique works of art. We're talking hand-decorated masterpieces using paint, markers, collage elements, crude xeroxes, and—wait for it—even bits of shower curtain.

So, while you're meticulously preserving your "vintage" Sun Ra vinyl, just remember: you might not be holding a mass-produced artifact, but rather a one-of-a-kind, hand-painted piece of genius that could have been adorned with a crayon doodle by the man who claimed to be from Saturn. Suddenly that "rare" find feels a little more... personal, doesn't it?