They’re The Meatmen… And This Cover Still Sucks

Lucas Jensen | April 16, 2009 2:00 pm

While I appreciate a good bodily fluid joke as much as the next emotionally stunted human male, the artwork for the Meatmen’s Cover The Earth (it’s a covers album… get it?) continues the Detroit punkers’ tradition of unfunny album covers. Head Meatman Tesco Vee was involved in the early days of Touch and Go, and the Meatmen somehow conned them and Homestead into releasing their “hilarious” records for years.

As a publicist and promoter, I’d often have writers or college radio MDs talk smack about my records, and that was fine, you know, part of the job. What many of them didn’t realize is that we acted as filters for a lot of the insanely wrongheaded and terrible releases that hit our doorstep every other day. At least once a week, a true catastrophe like this one would reach our doorstep unsolicited. We’d pass it around the office to much laughter, followed by depression that we lived in a world where true evil like this could exist. I have seen more psychedelic shrooms, pixelated 72-dpi JPEGs, fractals, and grown men making out with their guitars on album covers than you can imagine. (My favorites were always when a band member’s “hot” girlfriend or wife would appear on the cover, wearing a bikini or something. She was always credited as a model.)

Congratulations, Meatmen. You’ve joined the ranks of Scuba La Boobula and Marijuana: The Band in the “you are too old for this” pile.

By the way, is this two “tapioca and motor oil”-related “Art?”s in a row?

Cover The Earth [seeofsound.com; HT Christopher R. Weingarten]