What was the first ever album cover to be banned?
From Judy Garland to Judy Collins, The Beatles to Cardi B, music artists have courted controversy throughout the last century. It could be what they sing, say, or act in public. Or it could be the image used for their album cover that lands them in hot water.
Album artwork is a potentially controversial aspect of an artist’s career over which they might have little to no control. Nevertheless, many musicians have faced a backlash over the years over what appears on the outside of their album’s packaging. Some have even suffered the outright banning of their work.
For instance, countries in China and the Middle East banned the original cover of Lady Gaga’s 2013 release Artpop over the offence it apparently caused. The banned album artwork in question shows Gaga implicitly nude with a blue ball between her legs. Three years earlier, Kanye West’s artwork for the album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was pixelated because it displayed a cartoon of a naked West being ridden by a phoenix.
Other famously banned album covers include the artwork Axis: Bold as Love, which depicts Jimi Hendrix as the Hindu god Vishnu. This depiction led to the cover being banned in Malaysia, a country with a large Hindu minority. And Joy Division’s first EP release, An Ideal for Living, which featured a cartoon of a young Hitler Youth member. The band’s record label replaced the cover upon further release a month later.
Then there’s the cover for Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death, from which the artist’s hand gesture mimicking a phallus had to be airbrushed out. The satirical film This Is Spinal Tap later parodied this incident with a scene in which the fictional band’s album ‘Smell the Glove’ is censored.
But were any of these cases the first NSFWT (not suitable for wearing on a T-shirt) album to be banned?
Are nude album covers the most notorious?
Long before Alice Cooper stuck his thumb through a zipper, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were busy shocking the world with arguably the world’s first stark naked album cover. Their 1968 experimental record Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins shows the couple posing full-frontal and baring all in the attic of the house Lennon shared with his then-wife Cynthia.
The Beatles’ distributor EMI refused to press the cover. When it was finally put out, critics ravaged the album, in large part due to what was on the front of it.
That same year, Jimi Hendrix’s groundbreaking double album Electric Ladyland came out with a cover that the musician himself was unhappy with. As with his band’s previous album, Axis, Hendrix expressed his strong opposition to the artwork his record company wanted to use, but they went ahead with it anyway.
Their choice was a double-spread of 19 nude women, which Hendrix found misogynistic and which predictably led shops to refuse the record. All posthumous prints of the album have used the Reprise Records cover art, featuring a photo of Hendrix saturated with red and yellow hues.
Which album covers have been accused of child abuse?
For nudity, which really got artists into trouble, though, we have to go to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana album covers.
Firstly, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy album artwork designed by the album artists Hipgnosis warranted its own BBC Radio 4 documentary special, such was the storm it created. The cover depicts naked children from behind, clambering over rocks towards a jagged rock face looming over them. It’s intended to pay homage to the dystopian novel Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke.
The thing is, the children in the image are real. Stefan and Samantha Gates spent ten days being photographed in the nude on the Giant’s Causeway. “I remember the shoot really clearly, Samantha reflected in the documentary. “Mainly because it was freezing cold and rained the whole time.” Stefan returned to the site and listened to the album for the first time there. He explained that it removed a great weight from him to do so, implying the shoot had left him with childhood trauma.
Atlantic Records censored the child nudity upon the album’s release with a wrap-around paper sleeve displaying its title. But this wasn’t enough for parts of the Southern United States, which banned the record outright for almost a decade.
Led Zeppelin aren’t the only band to face accusations of obscenity and exploitation due to child nudity on their album covers. Probably the most famous example of all is Nirvana’s Nevermind, which centres on a naked male baby swimming underwater.
Big US supermarkets banned the album from their stores upon its release until its astronomical success changed their stance. Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain responded by suggesting a sticker should cover the offending part of the artwork, reading, “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile”.
Who is on the Nevermind album cover?
The naked baby in question is Spencer Elden, who has since embraced the fame the Nevermind album cover has brought him. He even recreated it for a photo shoot as an adult.
However, in 2021, Elden sued all parties involved in creating and profiting from the cover, alleging child sex abuse and commercial child exploitation. Despite previously being thrown out on the grounds that Elden himself had profited from the artwork, the suit rumbles on after a successful appeal lodged by Elden’s lawyers.
Nevermind is one of two Nirvana album covers to feature nudity on the front cover alongside In Utero, which faced bans for different reasons. The band pulled its initial back cover using a collage designed by Cobain that includes model foetuses after major supermarket chains refused to stock the album.
What about gory album art?
It’s not just nudity that’s been getting album covers banned, though. Violent cover art has had its fair share of censorship, too.
American death metal band Cannibal Corpse has made a career out of R-rated artwork to the extent that their entire output was banned in Germany until 2006. Some of their most shocking covers include Tomb of the Mutilated, which sees a skeleton performing a sex act on a bloodied female cadaver, and Gallery of Suicide, which graphically depicts what exactly its title suggests.
A more mainstream example of gory album covers is Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All. Originally entitled ‘Metal Up Your Ass’, the album had its original concept – title and artwork alike – quashed by the band’s record label. They feared the cover, fearing a hand protruding from a toilet bowl holding a bloodied dagger would lead to bans. So fans had to make do with a mallet sitting in a pool of blood instead.
So, who had the first album cover to be banned?
Yet these examples are far from the first album cover banned for depicting gory violence. In fact, one album cover’s ban predated all the nudity, child exploitation and gore outlined above.
Believe it or not, The Beatles are responsible for the first album cover to face an outright ban, for their 1966 US release Yesterday and Today. The banned artwork stands in stark contrast to every Beatles album cover that came before it. It shows the disturbing image of John, Paul George and Ringo in white lab coats, adorned with slabs of raw meat and dismembered dolls.
Why did The Beatles create their “butcher” album cover?
Prior to this album’s release, every Beatles album cover had featured more-or-less unremarkable photos of the four mop-topped Liverpool lads. They might have been smiling down from the steps of the EMI headquarters, depicted in various cheeky photo booth poses or staring hazily into the camera. But they were unmistakably on-brand as the clean-cut pop superstars Brian Epstein wanted them to be.
Suddenly, the Yesterday and Today artwork has them practising the kind of macabre humour that would have shocked and appalled teeny-bopper fans and their parents. When Capitol Records began shipping its initial print run of 750,000 album copies out to stores, there was an immediate backlash. A huge proportion of American record stores refused to stock the record.
Capitol actually had to initiate a military-style operation to recall the record. Most already-pressed copies were replaced with a more sanitary cover image of the band posing around a luggage trunk.
The idea for the “butcher” album cover came from its photographer, Robert Whitaker, who had already photographed the band on their previous American tour. John Lennon later described Whitaker as “a bit of a surrealist” who brought the dolls and pieces of meat to a photo shoot without prior warning.
Having become sick of photo sessions because, in Lennon’s words, the band “had to try and look normal and…didn’t feel it”, The Beatles loved the bizarre idea. Paul McCartney supposedly told the record company it was their “comment” on the mass slaughter of the Vietnam War.
At the time, anti-war sentiment was rising among Britain and American youth. This swell of countercultural feeling was beginning to reflect itself in the ideas of bands like The Beatles.
Of course, gory surrealism and opposition to a government-sanctioned war were never going to wash with major record store chains. And so, this album cover was destined to make censorship history.
Are banned album covers more valuable?
Of course, scarcity will always drive up demand and, of course, the value of a product. Add to that the classic Peep Show secret ingredient of “crime” and you have yourself a particularly potent concoction for banned album covers being some of the most valuable records.
But it isn’t just the scientific realities; there is also the artistic factor at hand. The Beatles made a conscious decision to push the boundaries of acceptability in the name of protest, and making that statement means it feels closer to who The Beatles were as artists. This is always a more desirable thing for collectors.
It means The Beatles’ famous “butcher” cover could fetch up to $125,000. With that said, it isn’t the most expensive album ever. That honour goes to Wu-Tang Clan: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was a single pressing never to be released or pressed again and went for $2million.
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