Think Kanye's ''My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy'' art is shocking? Outrageous album art is nothing new; here are 11 others that pushed the envelope... mostly with an excess of skin. WARNING: NSFW! seriously
''Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!'' Kanye West tweeted on the subject of the rapper-producer's latest opus on October 17. But it seems Mr. West will have to try harder to be as controversial as some of his rock star predecessors. A Walmart spokesperson subsequently told EW that, ''We're excited about Kanye West's new album and we look forward to carrying it in our stores on November 22nd. We did not reject the cover artwork and it was never presented to us to view.'' Walmart does indeed carry the album with an alternate cover. Maybe he should have stuck with the CD's working title: Good A-- Job
Capitol Records recalled hundreds of thousands of copies of Yesterday and Today following complaints and pasted them over with a more benign photograph of the Fab Four posing around a suitcase. A (paste-free) copy of the record featuring the so-called ''butcher'' cover has become one of the most sought-after Beatles collectibles.
(sorry for the nudity yall!)
The couple's experimental opus was distributed in a brown paper bag, but that didn't stop police in Newark from seizing 30,000 copies. Naughty bits censored here to keep things PG-13.
Even Hendrix didn't much care for the U.K. artwork that decorated Electric Ladyland. ''I didn't have nothing to do with that stupid LP cover,'' the guitar legend once insisted.
The close-up crotch on the Andy Warhol-designed artwork belonged not to Mick Jagger but Warhol actor Joe Dallesandro. The result raised eyebrows and drew the ire of purchasers who discovered too late how much damage Sticky Fingers' real zipper could do to other album covers.
Bow Wow Wow manager Malcolm McLaren provoked a huge furor in the U.K. after persuading the band's then 14-year-old singer Annabella Lwin to pose naked in a re-creation of Manet's painting Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.
Most of the brouhaha provoked by Nasty As They Wanna Be concerned its lewd songs (''The F--- Shop,'' anyone?). But the hip-hop act's choice of cover photograph didn't exactly win them any friends amongst the censorious-minded.
Following the controversy caused by the naked conjoined twins artwork for Jane's Addiction's 1988 debut Nothing's Shocking, singer Perry Farrell designed two covers for the band's follow-up: the image above (black bar added here) and a ''clean'' version that featured the group's name, the title of the album, and the First Amendment.
The pubic hair-showing cover of the the southern rockers' third album — an image taken from the bicentennial issue of Hustler magazine — was too hairy, in every sense, for Wal-Mart.
The politically-minded hip-hoppers' fourth CD, which originally featured this shocking image, was due to hit record store shelves on September 12, 2001. But the album was pulled, and its artwork redesigned, following the events of 9/11.
KMD members MF Doom and his brother DJ Subroc originally made Black Bastards in the early '90s, but their label Elektra declined to release it for reasons probably not entirely unconnected to its inflammatory artwork.
While overseas purchasers of the band's first album were treated to the risqué photograph above, those in the States had to make do with a rather less erotically-charged image of subatomic particles.
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