Fotomaker - Fotomaker (1978)

While this obviously isn't on the same level, as, say, Virgin Killer, there's definitely some implications to this album cover that I don't like in the slightest. At least Fotomaker only made a preteen girl pose her FACE provocatively on an album cover, which is more than I can say about what the Scorpions did, but the makeup sure doesn't help Fotomaker's case out any.

Ted Nugent - Love Grenade (2007)

You hear that, women with breast cancer? Ted Nugent says "Fuck you!"

Amazingly, this is actually less demeaning to women than the original, unused version of this album cover:

The Beatles - Yesterday and Today (original cover) (1966)

Let's ignore the whole "GREATEST BAND EVER" critical fawning that takes place whenever the Beatles are mentioned for a second and be reasonable here; this cover is fucking awful.

I can't really imagine how an idea this asinine was concocted in the first place. "Let's drape meat and plastic body parts on the Beatles!" sounds like a bad joke, not an actual art project. Even then, using one of said images for an album cover is not only asinine but a huge lapse in judgement. Everyone's favorite mop-topped whatevers covered in meat is not something your average pop fan wants to consider.

Some people consider this album cover to be a brilliant ploy by the Beatles to stick it to the man and make some sort of bold artistic statement. An artistic statement involving meat, I guess. I agree more with George Harrison's take on this whole thing; "I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them."

Butthole Surfers - Electriclarryland (1996)

I can't really nail this album cover for being in bad taste since a solid majority of the Butthole Surfers's album covers were in bad taste. I can at least take them to dask for doing bad taste so ineptly. I mean, this is a band that went from album covers featuring photos of starving Africans and John Wayne Gacy paintings to a very crudely drawn cartoon image of a guy getting a pencil shoved into his ear. This doesn't make the previously mentioned covers that much better, mind, it just makes you realize that if you're going to really go for bad taste, you might as well go all the way. It won't make your album cover any better, but it won't look so half-assed.

Fortran 5 - Avocado Suite (1995)

Not content to merely show someone using the toilet, Fortran 5 decided to go that tasteful extra mile and provided us with a nude man taking a bath. What the album title has to do with either of these things is something I'd rather not think about too hard.

Lords of Acid - The Crablouse (1994)

At first, I thought that a b-grade parody of a Calvin Klein ad would have to be better than their stupid Pussy cover. Then again, on that cover you don't have to play fun games like "figure out where the hell is that arm coming from" or "see how long you can avoid eye contact with pubic hair."

Devourment - Molesting the Decapitated (1999)

Yep, it's a decapitated corpse alright. One that happens to be naked. You have to give the band a few points for making their album's title fairly accurate, and double bonus points for not having the nude corpse be female since I get pretty damned tired of misogyny on metal album covers. Of course, in the end we're still left with a naked, headless corpse, and it doesn't take much thought to realize that this isn't a good thing.

Scorpions - Virgin Killer (original cover) (1976)

This cover stands head and shoulders above any I've ever seen. It's in such bad taste as to render the cover difficult to even look at. It plays off of societal taboos in a way that's crass and exploitative in the worst possible sense. It features a naked preteen posing suggestively with a broken glass starburst over her genitals. My friends, this is Virgin Killer.

How does an album cover like this come about? Apparently, the band's record label asked for a shocking cover, and they sure as hell got one. They got one so bad that even the band themselves started to have second thoughts about what they had done. The fact that the cover got pulled and replaced with a generic group photo of the band suggests that the record label figured that out perhaps just a tad too late.

So congratulations to you, Scorpions. You somehow managed to make the worst album cover ever. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

Circle Jerks - Golden Shower of Hits (1983)

If there's one thing more tiring than having a joke beat over your head, it's having the joke beat over your head when it isn't even that funny to begin with. Oh ha ha, the gold records are in the urinal due to their similarity in color to urine which is playing off the album title. Plus they're being pissed on to double up the album title hilarity! Oh what a laugh! I could just die!

Almafuerte - Del Entorno (1996)

I'm pretty sure that it's not a smart idea to connote your band's music with stepping in a pile of shit, or anything scatalogical in general, but by this point this seems less shocking for me and more really tiring. There's only so many times you can see shit or shit-like substances on album covers before it starts to get really old really fast.

Birth Control - Believe in the Pill (1972)

Believe in the pill or you'll end up dumping your malformed neon-pink fetus in a trash can next to some rotting food and a busted pair of aviators. This seems like a reasonable enough message, except for actually, you know, providing us with an image to go by. I guess we should at least be thankful that the band didn't try to go down a Chumbawamba-esque route and make the fetus look more realistic or actually have it be a real fetus.

Dayglo Abortions - Two Dogs Fucking (1990)

This is one of those few times when the album cover actually delivers on what the album's name is. It also makes you wish that it hadn't.

Scorpions - Lovedrive (original cover) (1979)

I have no idea how Scorpions managed to get the usually-reliable Hipgnosis to go along with this concept (or how they got them to go along with the cover to Animal Magnetism), but it should be obvious that this is pretty bad. The worst of it is that I don't even know what the point of this cover is. Maybe the moral of the cover is "if your hand is covered in bubblegum and you try to feel up a woman who just got out of the shower, you're in for rough sailing." Or maybe "if you're a swarthy Adam Corolla impersonator, your skin will have a 50% chance of chemically bonding with the flesh of bored, elderly brunettes." Or maybe "Scorpions should have never had a career in music, period."

CX Kidtronik - Krak Attack (2006)

While this album cover is really childish and stupid, I guess I have to give it slight credit for not taking the concept to its logical conclusion like the Bloodhound Gang might have. Then again, this feels like crediting a virus for only making me nauseous as opposed to making me vomit up blood.

Bloodhound Gang - Hefty Fine (2005)

Things we never needed to see on an album cover #547: a hairy, naked fat man hanging out inside a cardboard box

Regurgitate - Carnivorous Erection (2000)

Much has been said of the ancient folkloric device of vagina dentata, wherein males may experience a form of castration anxiety from fear that penetration may result in the vagina becoming a toothed maw capable of the destruction of his very manhood. However, very little has been written about the converse of this condition experienced in females, penile dentata. Women who suffer from this fear have reported becoming afraid that, while performing fellatio on a male partner, the penis will spout a very poorly-designed, monstrous head from its shaft, and attempt to bite off the woman's tongue. Research into this field is still forthcoming.

Chumbawamba - Anarchy (1994)

For the approximately zero people in the US who care (myself included), apparently Chumbawamba were an anarchist punk rock group before they decided to poison our ears by singing nonstop about getting piss drunk in pubs and falling flat on your ass an awful lot. At this early stage in the game, Chumbawamba decided to merely assault our eyes by showing us a photo of a baby being born. A rather ugly, bloody, cheerless photo of a baby's head sticking out of it's mother's uterus, to be precise. It's supposed to be the miracle of birth and all that, but let's face it; it's a pretty ugly miracle.

Eulenspygel - Eulenspygel 2 (1971)

What a perfectly wonderful album cover! A live baby chick standing on top of a charred, dead baby chick laying on top of a fried egg in a frying pan. And people were bitching about Faith No More letting a fish flop around out of water for a few seconds in their music video for "Epic"!

I think this is supposed to be a warning of some sort, along the lines of "this is your brain after listening to German prog rock."

Cannibal Corpse - Tomb of the Mutilated (1992)

I will be fair; prettymuch every Cannibal Corpse album cover is like this. They're clearly going for some sort of aesthetic that involves horribly bloody and mutilated corpses and they stick to it. That still doesn't make them any good, but you have to give them credit for trying at least.

At any rate, even as far as Cannibal Corpse album covers go, this is one of their worst. Aside from the extreme amount of blood, gore, and bile that's splattered all over the proceedings like fake blood in an early Peter Jackson film, we have what appears to be one mostly disemboweled corpse giving oral sex to another mostly disemboweled female corpse. Is it necrophilia when the both partners are presumably dead? And why in the hell should I even wonder about this?

Alvaro the Chilean with the Singing Nose - Drinkin My Own Sperm (1977)

Well there's not much that can be said about this album cover, is there?