Idolator’s Guide To Completely NSFW Album Art

noah | October 18, 2006 12:10 pm

The news that Ice-T was getting a little help from his well-endowed wife on the cover of his new album got us thinking about scandalous album covers of years past (we still have both covers of Ritual de lo Habitual). With the help of the listers at RateYourMusic, we’ve compiled a guide to our favorite–and least favorite–NSFW album covers. After the jump, we look back on front-cover nudity through the years.

dwarves.jpg

California’s Dwarves probably deserve a place in the NSFW Album Cover Hall Of Fame–they’ve even started enlisting the Suicide Girls for their live shows and DVDs. This cover, for their 1989 album Blood, Guts, and Pussy, even had a squeaky-clean sequel that came out ten years later.

lennon.jpg

Notable because he’s a Beatle, of course, but the cover for John and Yoko’s 1968 album is, we guarantee, the only one that inspired a protest song–and it was performed by none other than Sissy Spacek, using the pseudonym “Rainbo.”

sodom.jpg

Leave it to a death-metal band to fuse the idea of “not safe for work” with “not safe for your rotting body’s afterlife.” How many skulls do you think this cover’s photographer went through before the perfect belly-to-skull-to-belly proportion was attained?

unrest.jpg

Nothing says “back away from the stove” like this cover for Unrest’s “Animal Park” 7-inch … and no, we’re not going to make that joke.

greatwhite.jpg

“Dear Penthouse–You’re not going to believe what happened to me. I was out fishing with the bros, and all of a sudden, my hook really started to thrash…”

boxer.jpg

We’re posting this cover, from a 1975 album by the British outfit Boxer, because we want you to share in the stabbing pain that we felt when our eyes first happened upon it. Whoever thought this cover was a good idea should get a taste of his own art direction.

myles.jpg

We hope that whoever “Black Velvet” singer Alannah Myles hired to advise her career in the years after her Elvis-loving ballad topped the charts was kicked to the curb shortly after this cover came out.

sugarray.jpg

Sugar Ray’s music may be maddening, but you can’t say they aren’t savvy–they had the wisdom to realize that lead plasticman Mark McGrath probably wasn’t that high on the list of people whose front-cover nudity would be appreciated by the record-buying public, so they phoned up rock muse Nicole Eggert for a photoshoot.

NUDE NUDE NUDE!!! [RateYourMusic] Nude Album Art [RateYourMusic]

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