Recently in Banned in the USA Category

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking was the first solo album released by British musician Roger Waters following his split from Pink Floyd. It is a concept album about a man who fantasizes about an extramarital affair during a midlife crisis. The album is unique in that it takes place in real time during the early morning. 

When it was released in 1984, the album was controversial due to a nude photograph of model Linzi Drew that appeared on the cover. Many retailers refused to stock the album without the bare bottom of the model being censored with a black bar (right).

Online retailers including Amazon.com and iTunes continue to use the censored cover to illustrate the product. This is due to the censored cover being supplied by the record label rather than a concern over the image. This image would hardly raise an eyebrow in 2009.

The cover below is from the 2000 remaster CD of the album. The color balance and saturation is slightly different from the original LP. The AAX gallery contains all three covers, the original uncensored version, the original censored version, and the uncensored remaster version.

In a recent interview for an Oklahoma newspaper, musician Andrew W.K. spoke about the censoring of his 2001 debut album I Got Wet by retailers.

He said that it’s easy to get lost without a visual hook to catch a record executive’s attention. When he started marketing his debut disc, 2001’s “I Get Wet,” Andrew W.K. took the extreme route: he gave himself a bloody nose, and the resulting photo became his album cover.

Ultimately, the album cover was censored with a black sticker, but that was music to Andrew W.K.’s ears.

“This was my dream all along: I wanted an album cover that had to be censored,” he said. “Sure enough, a lot of people who bought the CD said they wanted to see what was behind the black sticker.”

Source: NewsOK.com

The interesting thing about this kind of marketing strategy is that it rarely works more than once — for the artist or for those using the same type of graphic image in the future.

A similar album cover was created for New York DJ Cazwells’ 2007 single Watch My Mouth and it barely got noticed. It seems that people are no longer quite as shocked by bloody faces — unless they are the faces of children.

Journal for Plague Lovers, the 2009 release by Manic Street Preachers, featured an illustration that appeared to represent the beaten and bloody face of a young boy. It was banned in may retail stores in the U.K. and drew concern in many other countries.

Whether it is toilets, nudity, or violence, the more we see in the marketplace, the less likely we are to be offended. If an album is good enough to stand the test of time, the effectiveness of a marketing gimmick like a deliberately offensive cover will wear thin. The public will become increasingly jaded and recording artists will have to go to other extremes to get noticed.

In previous installments of Banned in the USA, I have featured album covers that were censored due to depictions of nudity, bathroom fixtures, and cuts of raw meats. In each of those cases, I had no qualms about including the original album art in the article. The album cover Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by German heavy metal band Scorpions, is an exception.

An officer of the Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group, commented, “By allowing that image to remain posted, Wikipedia is helping to further facilitate perversion and pedophilia.” EContent magazine subsequently reported the Wikipedia community’s internal debate as concluding, “Prior discussion has determined by broad consensus that the Virgin Killer cover will not be removed”, and asserted that Wikipedia contributors “favor inclusion in all but the most extreme cases”. In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based non-government organization, added the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer to its internet blacklist due to concerns over legality of the image, which had been assessed as the lowest level of legal concern: “erotic posing with no sexual activity”. As a result, people using many major UK ISPs were blocked from viewing the entire article by the Cleanfeed system, and a large part of the U.K. was blocked from editing Wikipedia due to the means of blocking in use. Following discussion, representations by the Wikimedia Foundation (who host the Wikipedia website), and public complaints, the IWF reversed their decision three days later, and confirmed that in future they would not block copies of the image that were hosted overseas.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer

Scott and I agreed that the Virgin Killer cover is one that is of interest to album art collectors and historians — due mostly to the recent controversy. Therefore, it has been included in the AAX gallery and I have included it in this article. It would be almost impossible to discuss this cover without including the actual image. Doing so is not an endorsement of the record label’s decision to use a photograph of a nude child on an album cover. The cover was distibuted as part of a commercial recording by a major label (RCA) and is for that reason historically significant. Apparently, the cover was held up on national TV by Tipper Gore, the wife of former U.S. vice president. If it was acceptable for Mrs. Gore to show Vigin Killer to the world, I feel more comfortable with my decision to display the uncensored image here.

Unlike many other banned and censored album covers, the cover of Virgin Killer was intended to spark controversy. In a 2007 interview with Blasting-Zone.com, Scorpions guitarist Rudolf Schenker discussed releasing the cover:

Blasting-Zone.com: In hindsight, do you regret releasing the album Virgin Killer with the original uncensored cover?

Rudolf: “No. We didn’t actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, ‘Even if we have to go to jail, there’s no question that we’ll release that.’ On the song ‘Virgin Killer’, time is the virgin killer. But then, when we had to do the interviews about it, we said ‘Look, listen to the lyrics and then you’ll know what we’re talking about. We’re using this only to get attention. That’s what we do.’ Even the girl, when we met her fifteen years later, had no problem with the cover. Growing up in Europe, sexuality, of course not with children, was very normal. The lyrics really say it all. Time is the virgin killer. A kid comes into the world very naive, they lose that naiveness and then go into this life losing all of this getting into trouble. That was the basic idea about all of it.”

Source: BlabberMouth.net

As was expected, the cover was banned in many counties or sold in a plain wrapper. An alternate cover featuring a photo of the band was issued for use where the original was banned. The alternate cover is used on Amazon.com and iTunes.

The band has also released two other albums with controversial covers. Taken By Force depicted children playing with guns in a cemetery. The cover of Lovedrive features a woman with a bare breast that appears to be made of chewing gum.

In 2006, Classic Rock Revisited published an interview with Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth, in which he was asked about the Virgin Killer cover:

Classic Rock Revisited: “Virgin Killer” was banned!! Who was the girl on the cover and whose idea was it to have a nude child with broken glass in that area? What a statement.

Uli: “Looking at that picture today makes me cringe. It was done in the worst possible taste. Back then I was too immature to see that. Shame on me — I should have done everything in my power to stop it. The record company came up with the idea, I think.

[…]

“I can’t blame Tipper Gore for brandishing the cover on TV as offensive, though. She was completely right in doing so and she’s a good person anyway, although she probably didn’t make the effort to check out the lyrics, which put a different slant on the whole thing — can’t blame her for that either, because knowing what I know today, I would have possibly reacted in a similar vein.

Source: BlabberMouth.net

What do you think about this album cover and our decision to include it in the AlbumArtExchange gallery? Should AAX censor albums that are uploaded by our users?

On June 15, 1966, The Beatles released their classic album Yesterday and Today. The cover featured the Fab Four wearing lab coats and draped with parts of butchered animals and naked, decapitated dolls.

 

As soon as the album was shipped, many retailers refused to display it in their stores. Complaints flooded Capitol Records and the label took the almost unprecedented step of recalling all of the albums. The returned albums were unpacked and a new cover was actually glued over the original.

The new cover art featured the band and a steamer trunk. Like many other controversial album covers, the original cover for Yesterday and Today was used for the cover of a CD years later. The CD booklet featured both the “trunk” and the “butcher” covers as a reversable cover. It will be interesting to see which cover is used when this album is reissued.

Today, the “butcher” cover is likely to receive objections from groups like PETA. However, most retailers would not find it offensive. By today’s standards, it is barely even interesting. 

The “butcher” cover was featured on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow a couple of years ago. Here is the clip for those of you who missed it when it aired

In this second installment of Banned in the USA, we’ll look at a couple of album covers that have been censored because they featured something truly horrible — a toilet!

In 1966, The Mamas and The Papas released If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears. The covered featured the quartet sitting in a bathtub, fully clothed. Next to the tub was something that was rarely shown on TV and in movies at the time. The cover displayed a toilet — and not a very clean looking one at that!

The toilet was soon declared obscene by many U.S. retailers and was pulled from shelves. As often happens, a sticker was placed over the toilet and the LPs were redistributed. Subsequent covers were printed with the toilet covered.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the controversy regarding this particular cover. After the hysteria over the obscene toilet died down, someone noticed that four young people were — gasp — in a bathtub together! Not only that, one of the young women appeared to be thrusting her buttocks toward the camera in a very suggestive manner.

You can probably guess what happened next. The cover was censored for a second time. A third cover was created that cropped out the tub and Michelle Phillips’ butt. When If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears was released on CD, the first censored cover that simply hides the toilet was used rather than the cropped version. I guess people were still offended by toilets, but neither the bathtub nor Michelle Phillips’ butt were quite as offensive anymore.

Another well known cover banned for featuring a toilet is the 1968 Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet. Not only did this album cover feature a dirty-looking public toilet, it also showed a wall of restroom graffiti.

The Rolling Stones’ record labels in both the U.S. and the U.K. refused to release the album with the cover and the band refused to change it. The stand off lasted several months, but the band eventually gave in and allowed the album to be released with a cover that resembled a formal invitation.

When the album was released on CD, the original toilet/graffiti cover was used. The scans that we now have of this cover are from the CD, although sometimes I see it incorrectly labeled as the original LP release cover.

The United States has a long history of censoring album covers. Typically, retailers will object to a cover being displayed on their shelves and the record companies respond by either changing the cover or placing a sticker over the offending part of the cover.

One of the most controversial banned covers is John Lennon’s Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins — commonly called the Two Virgins album. The album features John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono in full frontal nudity.

As could be expected, the Two Virgins cover created a huge controversy. Retailers sold it in a brown paper wrapper and thousands of copies were confiscated as obscene material by local police across the country.

Eventually, an alternate cover was created for the album that showed the nude couple in a much more modest pose.

In spite of the publicity, the album was not a chart topper. However, it continues to be known as one of the most contorversial album covers of all time.

The reissued CD features a brown paper insert that simulates the brown paper wrapper in which the LP was forced to be sold.

So far, neither the reissue cover nor the alternate cover have been added to the collection.

There are many more album covers that have been banned or censored over the years. From time to time, we’ll do a feature on a particular cover. If you have one in mind that you think should be featured here, leave a comment.