Katy Perry
When choosing a cover for an album that you've put the past however many months of your heart and soul into, you need to make sure the artwork is both eye-catching and complimentary of the album. Here are some examples of where eye-catching and controversial seems to dominate.
This whole list came about after a copy of Katy Perry's Teenage Dream landed on our desks, with KP lying butt naked across a cloud. Brilliant.
The Strokes - Is This It
The Strokes made headlines when they decided to splash a leather-clad hand on the (rather smooth looking) bum of a naked lady. The bum actually belonged to photographer Colin Lane's girlfriend and the photo went down a storm across the world, unsurprisingly though, it didn’t make it onto the US release.
50 Cent - Get Rich Or Die Tryin'
Oh Fiddy, why do you always have to act so 'G'? Rather than having a nice, cool looking picture of him for his 2003 album, Get Rich Of Die Trying, he had to stand himself behind a glass pane with a bullet hole in it.
Fair enough 50 had been shot nine times at close range just three years earlier, but still, its obvious he was just hanging out behind some glass for this photo, and kids, it's never cool to play with guns.
In fact, speaking of guns….
James – Hey Ma
James got into big trouble when they combined a baby and a gun for the cover of their hey Ma album and the album art was banned from all kinds of different mediums.
It seems that babies and weapons don't go down too well with the general public, and neither do babies on their own sometimes as Nirvana found out in the 1990's….
Nirvana - Nevermind
Despite being the most famous albums covers of the decade, Nirvana were slammed for the use of a naked baby on their cover of Nevermind, after Kurt Cobain dreamed up the idea whilst watching a documentary about water birthing.
Poor Spender Elden will probably never live it down, especially considering Kurt Cobain only offered to cover the offending penis with a sticker which read, "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile," unsurprisingly, the cover went ahead uncensored.
Eminem - the Slim shady LP
Another fellow who loves a bit of controversy is Marshal Mathers, who, at the start of his career, decided to make a name for himself by having the cover of his The Slim Shady LP emblazoned with a picture of a supposedly-dead body in the boot of a car.
Ever the romantic Eminem claims that the cover was inspired by the track, Bonnie and Clyde, which is about taking his dead wife's body to the beach for disposal. Lovely.
Rage Against The Machine – Rage Against The Machine
Lets be fair, this was always going to crash and burn (ahem) in the eyes of the critics after RATM decided to slap a picture of Thích Quang Đuc -a Buddhist monk - burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963.
Whilst we appreciate the political point the band were trying to make, it still walks a very fine line between taste and tastelessness when you put a photo of a man actually dying on an album cover.
Prince - Lovesexy
Moving onto something just as awful to look at, we come to the cover of Prince's album Lovesexy. Let's face it, he's always been a little bit, well, odd, so this latest debacle was just the latest in a long line of things.
We had to include it though, just because it makes us laugh.
Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals
Unfortunately MM does not make us laugh, his take on the whole nude album cover is a LOT weirder as he took on a very androgynous, alien-like appearance for his Mechanical Animals cover.
Much like Lady GaGa and that nuns habit she dons for Allejandro, MM applied the latex for this photo, he did go the extra mile though and got himself some prosthetic breasts and had his genitalia covered with a plastic cup. You might as well though might you?
The Beatles – Yesterday and Today
We HAD to include this one as I never in a million years would have thought those sweet and innocent scousers would have released something that looks wuite os bad as this.
The infamous 'Butcher' cover of their 1966 album was recalled and replaced by Capitol records because of its extreme nature after the horrific original - which saw the Beatles wearing butcher's outfits and covered in meat and limbs from dolls led to public outcry and an immediate panic from the label. Brilliant.
Afghan Wings – Gentlemen
This album cover caused uproar from folk across the music world because of the use of children in what looks like a rather inappropriate setting. Despite the fact that there's no way on earth these kids knew what they were doing, the setup of the shot clearly infers they were doing 'that' look - possibly following some sort of sordid deed...