Strange, cringeworthy, and WTF album covers. Share your favorites

I used to have this LP, kind of average early 70’s “horn rock” a la Blood Sweat & Tears or Chicago:

and here is the detail you might not notice at first:

It was later reissued with bricks and barbed wire in place of the dripping fleshy “pie hole” (also note the cops looking in the window):

,. . . and still later an old school hip-hop label stole the image for their logo:

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Ah! I always wondered what that was! He definitely has some disturbing/weird album covers.

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I forgot about this one, which I actually really like:

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Agreed. I was hoping that you intelligent folks here at BB would come up with some real gems rather than endlessly reposting “By Request Only” - or at least provide some background. Thus far this thread has not disappointed.

Oh and that Millie Jackson cover is a favorite of mine too. Imagine the photo session, "needs more grunt! C’mon Millie!

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One client I had that didn’t work out was MC Hammer’s cousin, Bigg Marv. He contacted me to do his album cover work as well as redesign his website. I never heard back after giving him a quote. But I’ve always treasured this image he sent me to use as “inspiration” for his cover and website. The typo was extremely unfortunate.

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Maybe he was just trying to follow in the footsteps of other famous “raper/comedians”

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Man, that’s an unfortunate album cover (in retrospect).

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Here’s some album covers for albums I own that sometimes show up on my Apple TV in its wonderful album art screensaver. Every time they come up, they elicit some sort of reaction from others. Nothing too obscure here, but certainly worthy of comment.

While Richard James is no stranger to WTF album covers, this one by far tops them in my opinion.

Too $hort, keeping it classy.

I don’t really know what’s going on here, but I certainly don’t like it.

Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” album cover set (including the singles) are actually pretty great, and yes, the LP cover is pretty damn WTF (link may be NSFW) – but not as much as the version that circulated on the digital media sites. It’s like some sort of pixel art gone bad.

I’m sure this has been the subject of at least a few different fanfics.

Beat me to it. I love his videos.

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Off topic, but did you ever try to listen to Windowlicker while running the audio through a spectrum analyzer?

Some wild shit.

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Yup, and ΔMi−1 = −αΣn=1NDi[n][Σj∈C[i]Fji[n − 1] +Fexti[n−1]] off the same album has his face in it, if you use a log-scaled spectrogram:

And if you play around with a ring modulator on Milkman you can demodulate the weird alien voice intro into a guy re-enacting a sexual fantasy.

It goes from a throaty gibberish to actual speech if you hit the ring modulator’s original frequency. I can’t remember the settings you need though, but you can find it on youtube.

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That’s the big one, but there’s more than just that.

A few other artists have pulled similar tricks over the years, but none with so many on one album.

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Spectrograms! If you know the audio signature it’s pretty easy to pick up when songs are doing this. Of course the musicians that tend to use tricks like this already have pretty wild music to begin with.

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I’ve always been a fan of V.Snare’s cat pictures in Look:

… which also has a rather unsettling album cover:

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Aphex Twins is a mind trip, love his music and videos. Had no idea about those hidden images in the song files :smiley: neat

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At the very least I can tell you that the Negativland cover is a reworking of Janet Jackson’s cover shot on Rolling Stone magazine back in the day (but you knew that, did you know that, is this pedantic?):

Had a subscription back then but haven’t the faintest recall of the articles therein.

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Not pedantic at all. TIL.

Doesn’t make it any less creepy, but at least now I know what the inspiration was.

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It was a minor controversy when it happened in '93, much less so when she and Justin did their bra-zen little show at the Stuperbowl a few years later.

The band name is “whitesnake” so you might say subtlety was not really their strong suit.

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