Tag Archives: bad album art

Seriously Bad Album Covers

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We here at Turntabling are proud of the little collection of WTF album covers, but Nick DiFonzo’s book really takes the cake. Seriously Bad Album Covers displays 50 years and over 250 pages worth of the worst album covers ever. This import features a whopping 225 covers with a variety of wretched concepts, butt-ugly musicians and rotten excesses. Any vinyl junkie should add this to their collection of vinyl-related ephemera. This is hours and hours of entertainment just waiting to be had.

One day we are hoping that Taschen dedicates one of their luxuriously assembled editions to awful art, but until then this tome is probably THE authority on crapola covers.

WTF Returns: Lennon and Ono’s Junk

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According to the John Lennon site Absolute Elsewhere, John Lennon himself referred to this album photo for Two Virgins as featuring two “flabby junkies”. The utter madness of releasing this album cover in 1968 can’t be underestimated.

It’s not as it is today with several decades of naked people on album sleeves and music videos behind us. John Lennon’s flaccid, wilty junk swaying back and forth in the squalor of his apartment wasn’t considered in poor taste, it was actually branded as pornography!

What possessed Ono and Lennon to put their naked naughty bits on Two Virgins is beyond me, but Absolute Elsewhere speculates that Lennon might have been a closet exhibitionist. No matter.

What matters to you is that your eyeballs have been permanently seared with the vision of Lennon and Ono proudly displaying pubic shrubbery so massive by today’s standards that endangered bald eagles could build a nest there.


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WTF: Denmark Vs. Sweden

Crap album art isn’t always about the thing itself. Sometimes a merely nauseating album cover can reach dizzying new lows when compared side-by-side to equally barf inducing artwork. Submitted for your approval, all the way from Denmark–the cover of Laid Back’s Keep Smiling album. This isn’t the most rotten thing ever made, but let’s call this artwork…uninspired:

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Now compare it to the utterly goofy and craptacular cover for this Swedish nonsense– Kjell Kraghe’s Vind I Seglen. This album cover takes the seafaring them to a similarly fucktarded new low. We’re faced with a serious chicken-and-egg question here. Which wretched cover came first? Was this some kind of harmonic convergence of dumbass graphic design? Or was somebody thinking, “No way is that OTHER windmill-and-wooden-shoes country going to show US up in the dumbass graphics department!”

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This album cover reminds me of Beavis and Butthead episode where Butthead delivers a stunning critique of a bad 90s music video by merely uttering the phrase, “Look at his FACE!” That’s all we really need to say here, isn’t it? Except those two sails placed so perfectly in symmetry next to this hambone Ricky Schroeder lookalike makes it appear this guy has some kind of freakish protruberances connected to that suit of his. 

So perhaps these are both, on their own,  merely lame-o record covers. But viewed side by side they give me the horrors. We know Sweden and Denmark are capable of better than this…but then again, we haven’t even started looking at the bad death metal album covers from these two countries. Just you wait, this stuff looks tame (well, it IS tame) by comparison.

WTF: Porter Wagoner’s The Bottom of the Bottle

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Porter Wagoner may have been one of the legends of country music, but the dudes who approved the artwork for his records were clearly smoking Jimson weed for this one. Just WTF is going on with this picture, anyway?

Wagoner looks like he’s contemplating drinking this rotgut in spite of the fact that there’s a little man inside. “Hey Porter, over here! Look, you don’t wanna drink this. I just wee’d inside this bottle and it smells like a homeless shelter. Fer chrissakes, Porter…DON’T DRINK MEEEEEEEEE!”

The expression on Porter Wagoner’s face is priceless. It’s a cross between “Goddamn, I really want to tie one on here,” and “I wonder if free will is an artificial construct of the human mind or if it’s a crucial part of what makes our all-too-brief existence what it is?”

Or perhaps it’s kidney stones.