kanye west dark fantasy banned album cover

Needless to say, such albums would never appear either in Walmart or on iTunes, which says a lot about both the market West is going for, and the nature of the ‘scandal’ that formed around the ‘banning’ of the cover. And who could forget the 2006 Top Dog compilation album Slam Dunk’n Hoes, featuring ‘Mr Dog’ – with straight face – dunking a scantily clad woman upside down through a basketball hoop.Īll of these covers, delivered with either deadpan photography or amateur Photoshop trickery, are gleefully aggressive to the concept of taste. Then there’s Indo G with his cover for Christmas N’ Memphis, from 2002, where ‘G’, dressed as Santa with a leaking sackful of cash, is being held up by a pair of colossal silver pistols. The experts among you will doubtless be able to cast your minds back to 1991, and the album art of Geto Boys’s We Can’t Be Stopped, featuring group member Bushwick Bill on a hospital gurney after being shot in the eye. I am no expert on hip-hop album covers, but my research confirms a suspicion: that the hip-hop community is not known for shying away from bizarre confrontational imagery of dubious taste. The response to the album has been clear: it is banned from the shelves of Walmart (of which more later) and comically pixelated on iTunes to protect us from the cover’s erotic allure. West has joined characters such as Rodrigo, Big Red and Little Ricky in Condo’s cast of antipodal subjects, all boxed into a world of shattered faces, screaming lust and teeth-gnashing existential crisis. In the most surreal of a range of five covers, we see the rapper in flagrante – supine on the couch, beer in hand and straddled by a bat-eared, armless harpy with spotted tail, wings and hairy legs. As is now widely known, Kanye West has been integrated into the unmistakable painting language of George Condo for the cover of his new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Kanye west dark fantasy banned album cover