Rolling Stone has released a list of the worst album covers of all time. Several hard rock/metal albums were listed including Metallica’s “Black Album” (No. 41), Ozzy Osbourne’s “Down To Earth” (No. 30), Anthrax’s “Fistful of Metal” (No. 23), Scorpions’ “Lovedrive” (No. 18), Ted Nugent’s “Love Grenade” (No. 5) and Creed’s “Weathered” (No. 3).
Van Halen’s “Balance” (No. 20), Billy Squire’s “Signs Of Life” (No. 24), Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” (No. 25), Tom Petty’s and the Heartbreakers’ “Hard Promises” (No. 42) and Queen’s “The Miracle” (No. 47) were some of the rock releases on the list.
The top spot, however, went to Limp Bizkit’s “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.” Rolling Stone wrote about the cover: “Five Gollum-looking dudes lolling around on a bed of nitrate-infused meat? Sure, that’s a fair representation of Limp Bizkit. Following up on their breakthrough hit Significant Other, the nu metal band leaned even harder into being repulsive — ‘chocolate starfish’ is a slang term for ‘asshole,’ a nickname vocalist Fred Durst adopted with pride — as a substitute for an actual artistic philosophy. This cover (made by the band’s guitarist, Wes Borland) is both tacky and gross, but at least it works as a warning label: What you see is what you get.”
Of Creed’s “Weathered”: “If you want proof that nepotism is a scourge on our cultural landscape, you need only consider this album cover, the creation of guitarist Mark Tremonti’s brother Daniel Tremonti. We’d be annoyed by the semi-competent Photoshop fakery of the band’s faces being digitally carved into a digital tree, except that no real-life tree deserves to have Creed carved into it.”
On Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet”: “After rejecting one proposed cover of Bon Jovi dressed as cowboys and another of a curvy girl in a wet T-shirt emblazoned with the Slippery When Wet title, the band and the record label found themselves at an impasse. The improvised last-minute solution: Photographer Mark Weiss sprayed a black garbage bag with water and then singer Jon Bon Jovi wrote the title in the droplets with his finger. As guitarist Richie Sambora noted, ‘So simple, and not very impressive.’”
And of Metallica’s “Black Album”: “When Spinal Tap put out an all-black album cover for Smell the Glove in the movie This Is Spinal Tap, it was intended as parody of rock-star idiocy — ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black‘”‘ — not a creative brief. Metallica’s version of Smell the Glove (usually called the Black Album) gussied up the blackness just a little, with some matte-vs.-gloss images that didn’t really work.”
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