For decades, album cover artwork was one of the most popular visual media that reached millions of people. The earliest album covers date to the 1930’s, when the advent of 33⅓ rpm records required new packaging in the form of folded-over sleeves, which doubled as a space to advertise the contents of the album. One of the first albums with an abstract cover design was 1945’s The Nat King Cole Trio, and album cover artwork has become more and more creative since.
There’s no shortage of bands that push the envelope artistically or politically. Naturally, these same bands use their album cover as yet another opportunity to make a bold statement–and sometimes they push things too far. Every decade has its examples, but here are a few particularly shocking ones from the naughty 90’s.
Over 600 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of 15 Most Controversial Album Covers Of The ’90s
This list is
based on user voting. The order reflects the consensus of our voters and is not influenced by paid placements or editorial bias.
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The cover of NOFX’s 1996 album Heavy Petting Zoo features an idyllic barnyard scene that also includes a man having inappropriate relations with a sheep. There were actually two different versions of this image, one for the CD and one for the vinyl edition.
While the album drew plenty of criticism stateside – CMJ News Music Monthly called it NOFX’s “nastiest cover yet” – Germany banned the LP version in October 1996 for violating obscenity laws and confiscated all sold copies.
Ranked #
1
by
476
voters with
a
74
% upvote rate
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The band CKY has always courted controversy – the band’s name itself stands for “Camp Kill Yourself,” after all. For its first studio album with the label Volcom Entertainment, the band wanted a cover with a painting depicting the suicide of R. Budd Dwyer.
In January 1987, Dwyer, a Pennsylvania state treasurer who, months prior, had been convicted of bribery, fatally shot himself in front of television cameras. Volcom refused to approve the cover, and the album was released with another cover entirely.
Ranked #
2
by
310
voters with
a
71
% upvote rate
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The cover for Ice-T’s album Home Invasion incited a special kind of outrage. The artwork shows a teen listening to the album while his parents are attacked in a home invasion; meanwhile, a wizard-like Ice-T projects electricity into the teen’s brain.
The cover wasn’t just humorous, it had a message. Ice-T said: “We’ve been in your house for four or five years, and while you’re sitting at the dinner table talking racist sh*t, your kids are sitting in their rooms with headsets pumping Public Enemy. And you don’t even know it.”
Warner Bros. didn’t want to publish the album cover, as Ice-T’s 1992 song “Cop Killer” had already drawn criticism from conservative critics. Ice-T refused to change it, prompting him to leave Warner Bros. and release the album through his own label, Rhyme Syndicate Records.
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3
by
328
voters with
a
63
% upvote rate
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Plenty of bands have mined youthful disaffection to move records, and Megadeth’s sixth album is a textbook example. The cover depicts an elderly woman hanging babies upside-down on an apparently endless clothesline. The image takes inspiration from the album’s title track, “Youthanasia,” which says: “We’ve been hung out to dry.”
According to bassist David Ellefson, “That song was probably the strongest representation of how we feel about the young people who listen to our music and what their future holds for them. It’s like you have a choice, you can become proactive or you can choose ‘Youthanasia.’”
In response, Malaysia and Singapore refused to allow the album’s sale, calling the cover “disrespectful.” Retailers in Canada and Germany also refused to stock it, but Megadeth refused to supply an alternate cover.
Ranked #
4
by
339
voters with
a
61
% upvote rate
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Type O Negative is a Brooklyn-based goth metal band that’s known equally for its grim music and wry sense of humor. Its second album, The Origin of the Feces, is an obvious parody of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, and its original album cover featured a closeup of lead singer Peter Steele’s excrement.
The album was eventually reissued with a blurred-out image, and another version followed that included a rendering of Michael Wolgemut’s 1493 painting “The Dance of Death.”
In 2022, Type-O Negative re-released the album with the original artwork, as well as a scratch-and-sniff sticker.
Ranked #
5
by
278
voters with
a
53
% upvote rate
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Balance was the last full studio album Van Halen released with Sammy Hagar as their lead singer, and the album itself is one giant metaphor for the band’s internal strife.
After nearly calling it The Seventh Seal, the band changed the album’s name to Balance to reflect its search for inner harmony – Eddie van Halen had recently become sober and clashed with Hagar’s hard-partying lifestyle, and the band’s longtime manager Ed Leffler had recently died.
Photographer Glen Wexler, who designed the cover, came up with idea of nude conjoined twins playing on a seesaw in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Wexler explained:
Other than the obvious expression of inseparable male and female characteristics, the realization of the idea began to focus on a number of ironies: the impossibility of the conjoined twins actually playing on the seesaw; the “calm” twin actually being the aggressive one, pulling the hair of his sibling to create the appearance of an aggressive child; and having no one else to play with in a desolate post-apocalyptic setting, in which unusable playground equipment is the only object in sight. I also had the opportunity to “design” the twins to mimic the shape of the “VH” logo.
The cover was certainly controversial, so much so that Van Halen released an alternate version with one non-conjoined child in Japan.
Ranked #
6
by
288
voters with
a
52
% upvote rate
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