Museum of Bad Album Covers | Hacker News Reader

Museum of Bad Album Covers

zonicweb.net

194 pointsgscott110 comments

I feel like they've missed the point that a lot of those covers. A lot of them are exactly as cheesy, grotesque or as minimalist as they intend to be.

Does that make them bad if they serve the purpose they were designed for?

If they were designed to be just that: bad; then aren’t they filling their purpose by being in this museum?

Maybe true but there are a large number of Covers that were made genuinely to look cool in a Disco era.

Here in Sweden we have this thing called "Dansband". That is a treasure trove of cringey album covers that I believe were mostly genuine.

One of the bands is even called Junix, I remember finding a tape of them in a car once. It actually said UNIX but I can't find any reference to this old band name now, they're all called JUNIX.

I hope you have seen this page: http://katastrofalaomslag.blogspot.com/

Firefox warned me that it blocked a cryptominer on that page.

I would have thought Google would block that on their properties so it surprised me.

Edit: On Virustotal most say "Clean" but some say "Unrated".

the website is not encrypted, could've been some other party too that did the injection. Are you at a public wifi hotspot?

No, it was during lunchbreak at the office in my own house, reputable ISP, cabled network, clean PC.

I got the warning with Firefox too. First time I've seen that... great.

No I had not, thank you!

In return have this other Swedish blog: http://saljgrejmedtjej.se/

The Scorpions - Virgin Killer (the original one especially)?

Am I on a list now for having looked at that?

There are so many lists these days, it should be more suspicious if you're not on any lists.

If you're not on at least 2 lists, you have a boring life.

It's actually a good cover. Extremely disturbing, and artsy at the same time.

It's a photo of a nude 10 year old.

> It's a photo of a nude 10 year old.

Sure, objectively there's nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that the kid is in a very unlikely position for a child; and then the broken glass effect is terrifying. It gives me an extremely uneasy, disgusting, feeling. On the other hand, I acknowledge that the composition is quite masterful. Thus, it is a work of art that does not leave you indifferent, and you remember it for a long time after having seen it. I guess that makes it a very good, unforgettable cover for a music album.

Might be a regional thing. I suppose in Europe, the nudity could denote innocence, but in the US, my immediate takeaway of a nude prepubescent child on the cover of an album called "Virgin Killer" would suggest that she was a victim of sexual violence before being murdered (particularly since the broken glass is right over the genitalia). So I'd probably argue it's simply in poor taste.

It's bad taste especially that it was used as a means to drive controversy and the song was basically constructed around the title also. But it is not about killing, instead one of the band members stated that "Virgin Killer is none other than the demon of our time, the less compassionate side of the societies we live in today—brutally trampling upon the heart and soul of innocence." [0]. Apparently the Band regrets it today and there's more background info and apparently there was a big Wikipedia shitstorm in 2008 about removing the artwork or not which led to some sort of edit ban in the UK [1].

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100509235302/http://www.roadru...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer#Artwork

As I said, though, there were any number of other ways you could have visually portrayed childhood innocence. The same model wearing early-childhood styled clothing, or barefoot with a flower garland around her head, would have conveyed the same message. The band was either naive or willfully blind to the use of nudity purely to be "edgy".

Ok I admit some of those are tough to defend, but it's worth pointing out that in the old days most musicians that recorded albums had significant organic validation of their art through live performance. You have to assume these guys http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/stuffparty.jpg had been successfully entertaining audiences for years and likely making a good living of it - and were probably pretty good musicians too.

Today, putting out an "album", as well as producing sophisticated album art is so much easier, but the true test is, can it touch the audience artistically and emotionally? Not always the case!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_biO5PERY8v4/SkwIcxMBkQI/AAAAAAAAB1...

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_see81gLpA20/SiUmjavIZAI/AAAAAAAAA...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/94/06/3c/94063c1673c474d8919f28804...

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/59/90/e2/5990e27fce190e615ccbf48bd...

https://blogs.opovo.com.br/respirandomusica/wp-content/uploa...

https://terceiramargemorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/d2821-...

I'm going to let you carry this on, but we're all know which music genre can easily win this title.

That second one looks like Borat. Are we sure that Sacha Baron Cohen isn't a time traveler and/or vampire?

I used to work in a record shop which had this beauty on the wall constantly looking at me, gave me nightmares ...

http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/handsomebeasts.jpg

TIL about the official "the handsome beasts" website.

http://www.thehandsomebeasts.co.uk/about.html

> For websites designed at reasonable prices click this banner.

Doing so provides proof that the site is an honest relic of its time, rather than an homage; 1 website in his portfolio uses/d Bravehost and all (but the two bands’) fail to resolve to site intended.

My first job while at Uni was at a record store, aptly named “rare records”. It always surprised me the random shit (usually with equally random cover art) that used to sell for big dollars.

That horror was something of an exception, most of the stock was rare Northern Soul, I made a lot of tapes ...

Holy shit, I need to erase this from my memory.

It's a shame that most of these records are not available on Spotify, and - I think - it's the same on most of the others streaming services.

You know, I really wondered how bad was the music behind the bad covers.

But this made me realize - even more - how limited and not inclusive are these streaming service catalogs, in spite of their claims.

My friends father had a ton of jazz records. He lamented in the mid 80s that he couldn’t replace most of them with cds as they weren’t being re-issued, and some were very good. Getting stuff recorded was harder back then so there was less content coming out.

I can’t imagine most of those are on streaming..lost to the ages. A lot of it won’t be missed but there are probably some hidden gems too

Maybe not “most” depending on how that is defined, but a lot of blues/jazz/R&B from those days can be found on YouTube if it isn’t on Spotify or Apple Music - there are many channels that upload recordings of old EPs/LPs. I listen mostly to 50s-70s jazz and YouTube has proven the most reliable.

That said, Apple Music has a decent catalog of jazz, including many smaller artists - it’s actually the bigger names (whose estates have meaningful control over their body of work) that are sometimes patchier. Apple Music is also very good for finding new artists, and they put good work into their jazz playlists (even if the choices are maybe a bit anodyne).

Spotify used to be horrible for jazz - apparently it’s gotten better, but I remember signing up for a free month and being extremely disappointed.

One of my favorite albums from the 90s has possibly the lamest cover in jazz history - not offensively bad or distasteful, more along the lines of “high school portrait”: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b4/Groove_Elatio...

If you had shown me this cover without me knowing who John Scofield was, I would have assumed this album was particularly dorky elevator music. But it’s great stuff: https://youtu.be/QBWTJ--Son8

That said...... there are cases where you can probably judge books by their covers: http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/letmetouch.jpg

I had never seen the cover to this album... it makes it look like a children’s sing along album. Sco is the man though!

YouTube is probably the best place to look for old, obscure music like this, since users can just upload anything they like. If the label didn't bother to put it on Spotify, they probably didn't bother to put it into the YouTube Content ID program either. You won't find everything, but it's the best spot I'm aware of.

Well, Immortal is in the first 5 album covers and they obviously have some all time classics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2rJrB2pHtY

If you had a chuckle at Immortal's Battles in the North album cover, please watch the video for The Call of the Wintermoon [0], which was on their first album, Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism. I'm convinced they knew it was hilarious

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VBdAY8eA9w

Abbath (former lead of Immortal) is a big goofball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORey8ZYyaQU

Immortal very much was doing the whole black metal imagery thing with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Not parody, but absolutely having fun with it and not taking anything seriously.

And who can forget the crab walk from ALL SHALL FALL: https://gfycat.com/afraidnastyflatcoatretriever

This just brought back almost 20yr old memories of the Rock and Roll Confidential Hall of Douchebags which is sadly no longer online but does exist in the archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060819005942/http://www.rockan...

I recollect the "brick-wallers" and the train track photos, yes. I always thought they were a little hard on the bands who had not a lot of money or inspiration, and "hired" photographers (or just cousins with cameras) for covers, but they did have some very, uh, interesting covers in the mix as well.

Well initially i think these was to protect the record, and let you Id it quickly one purchased.

To be fair a lot of there were made before computers.

I don’t think people judge records by their covers..

Though some like Led Zeppelin 3 and pyshical grafitti had holes cut into their outer shells making them kinda art like. Then there is the Beatles “white album” and spinal taps “smell the globe” (black album) which I think metálica copied....

Now we're getting into what shade of black did they use territory.

Zeppelin 3 album spinner in action (30 seconds):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajA76b3aeN0

Immortal’s “Battles in the North” is generally regarded as a classic black metal album cover from a legendary band. Are there other covers here that are beloved by their intended audience but not understood or appreciated by outsiders?

Covers as in the album cover, or the music contained therein? Because if the latter, it's probably pretty much every music out there.

Sacred Son's self titled album is a really funny black metal album cover, but it's probably not appreciated by a lot of black metal fans. https://www.discogs.com/Sacred-Son-Sacred-Son/release/115028...

Yeah that one was a real head-scratcher for everyone. It struck me as almost trolling the black metal crowd, which I appreciated.

All the Scorpions covers he put there in that site are good. Sorry mate.

Can't seem to find 'Smell the Glove' anywhere, the original that is.

The best worst album cover of all time. :-)

This reminds me of "Gallery of Shame" talk from a computer games festival/conference, I saw on YouTube some time back:

"Love them or hate them, the covers of some games leave a lot to be desired. Ashens has found a goldmine full of really, really bad ones. Really."

https://youtu.be/wFF9O73iwko

He has even written not one, but two books about very bad games, that you have probably never heard off.

Not sure why they think The Final Countdown cover is so bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's nothing. Welcome to Sweden:

https://katastrofalaomslag.blogspot.com/search/label/Dansban...

Fun fact: the reason that Swedish dance bands[1] dressed so f*ed up is that there was a tax deduction for stage clothes that could obviously not be worn off stage.

Result: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/uTKO3VfN8Z3acjfEltK4...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansband

Nothing beats Yugoslav album covers

https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-vintage-album-covers-yugosl...

The music is even worse

Sidestepping any consideration of taste or art, I was bemused to find a selection of albums by ventriloquists:

http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/hallofsh30.htm

Sadly the old "It Crept From The Bins" site (a sidebar to the Phoenix New Times page "Jesus Of The Week") seems to be gone, even from the Wayback Machine. They were doing satire and parodies of album art going back to the early 1990s web, and their work was hysterically funny.

Wayback has some snippets of the Jesus Of The Week stuff that caused plenty of exploded heads amongst devout Christians who missed the entire point of the site, which was to hilariously and savagely critique modern artifacts bearing images of Jesus and not that personage.

The Queen cover for The Miracle was pretty cutting edge for the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_42uJoU41y0

Sites like these really reinstate my faith in the internet. Glorious.

Fair warning that their #1 worst album cover of all time is the cover of the album "Virgin Killer", and definitely NSFW...

I almost feel bad when something like this get on top of hn because, you know it will do well, and you feel for their bandwidth bill.

In my experience most simple virtual hosts don't bill for traffic, but rather just come with a capped bandwidth. So probably no extra costs I'd assume.

There are other host sites available besides AWS and GCP.

I used several of these in law lectures on content and IP. They are shocking but not actually illegal, which is what you need when teaching about illegal material that you dare not actually show. Two that I used even made the top 10 worst, although I would defend both as good art. Shocking the audience is part of what rock is about.

Okay, I'm going to say it. I think Whipped Cream & Other Delights is a great album with a great cover.

+100 points for a website with pictures that is viewable and clickable with JavaScript disabled!

This is how the web should be.

On the other hand, navigation between the different pages is less than ideal, as is navigating away to see a larger image. This could be enhanced with Javascript to bring the relevant content onto the same page.

bug report: you beep using the word "bad" when I think you meant to say "amazing"

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/these_are_probably_the_w...

Can we have a Museum of Bad Webpages? I'll kick us off.

http://www.peterserafinowicz.com/brian-butterfield/

https://securescrypt.com/

If you click through on the links, you'll be rewarded with a whole network of equally bad websites full of probably fraudulent companies, fake cryptocoins and what not.

This is bad in more than one good way I think: http://dhmo.org/

From the page:

The causative link between Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) and Cancer is currently not established, although a significant amount of evidence seems to suggest that DHMO at least plays a role in the formation of cancer...

...

What is known about these cancers is that Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in detectable and biologically significant levels in virtually all tumors and other cancerous and pre-cancerous growths.

I'm sad that the death of Flash will mean the demise of one of the greatest websites of all time. As far as I'm concerned, the Web peaked in 1999 with this site and it's all been downhill since.

If you can view it with Flash, it's much recommended. Turn the volume up and whatever you do, don't skip the intro:

http://superior-web-solutions.com

Does it count if it's an intentionally-bad parody, like this?

I had the same thought when I posted it. Probably not, is the answer.

There's this site that's been around for a while. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

I miss this aesthetic so much. I'm really not a fan of the incessant HGTV-ization of everything, everywhere.

A strong recent candidate is Black Flag's "What The..."[1].

It's especially offensive in the context of their original album covers[2] (drawn by Raymond Pettibon), which were instrumental in defining the hardcore punk visual style.

Edit: Fixed link broken by HN.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Black_Flag_-_...

[2]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/e3/5a/78e35a6e1a3090ae3dd1... (CW: illustrated violence and NSFW)

ahaha!! i love that website, so genuine and wholesome! and also super fast and to the point.

and it is more entertaining than the endless scroll of boredom of the eternal september.

Gonna have to disagree with Sabotage being included – Bill Ward looks iconic in those red pants!

Haters gonna hate. If you aspire to do anything compelling and original, you have to take risks, and you have to "commit" as they say in that riskiest of artistic endeavors, comedy. Sometimes the risks don't work out, or sometimes they don't work out for a particular audience.

Correction: “haters gonna cancel”

"No thanks" to the partisan hijack. My original post applies no matter who the artist is or what they aspire to say.

Black Sabbath: Born Again featuring Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan.

Universally panned cover and horribly produced but I always felt the songs were underrated.

Scorpions: Virgin Killer, NSFA

Sooo, museum of "my taste is all that matters", huh? Because different strokes for different folks.

Isn't that also true for a "normal" museum? As in, they showcase what they think is pretty/good/whatever, and the museum's curator's taste may be different than mine.

Bad? They are excellent!

So much fun!

The interface of the website is very fitting ;)

If you're the author, can you change two things: - change font size to default - move navigation to the top, so that "next" button is always in the same spot

And get rid of the stripey background image. It's not terrible on my monitor, but it's prone to flicker on LCDs: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php#invpattern.

But I have a feeling that the site is older than consumer LCDs.

Best viewed in 800x600 resolution.

Zooming in to 150% or 200% works though, even with the pixel-aligned stripy background.

I'd prefer them to change two other things: the design and the layout.

Hacker News: Websites were so much more creative in the old days before standard templates and layouts made everything so generic and bland. Each was a work of individual art and craftsmanship.

Also Hacker News: (adjusts bifocals) WTF even is this mess?!

Hacker News: more than just one person.

Webpage from 1998 salutes you!

First one coming to mind is Nirvana's Nevermind. I guess cause I bought it for a friend's birthday. She specifically asked for me for that album, so all I did was buying it. But it was weird, especially as I was a young boy back then (IIRC around 11 y.o.). I doubt it'd be OK to publish an album cover like that nowadays, and frankly, I agree.

Bad is subjective though. I mean, look at all the Thunderdome covers. Terribly cheesy if you ask me, but youth found it cool I guess. Then again, some people would say Lords of Acid's covers are bad (or "satanistic") whereas other would say "kinky". That's the problem with the term 'bad'; its too open for interpretation. Imagine a website with "bad news articles". Same problem.

What? The Nevermind cover is generally considered one of most iconic of all time...

Iconic? Iconic of what? Its a naked baby. The baby gave no consent for being photographed naked (as nobody age < 18 can give legal consent for such). A naked picture of a baby belongs only to the parents, not the entire world.

Only thing it has going for it, is that when the album was released there was no widespread Internet usage among civilians. With no Internet as we know it today available, that makes an eventual outcry about the picture less likely, and more difficult to organize. But I for sure remember it being controversial back then.

There really is no particular reason that a picture of a clothed baby is any less private than that of a nude one, in my mind. Did you not see nude children at the beach as an 11-year old child?

Terrible analogy.

Picture is different than live. Intent is different, too.

CD cover was completely unexpected for me.

Ignoring your own children, do you normally take pictures of nude children on a beach? Would you commercialize a naked picture of your baby son?

I wouldn't take a picture of clothed children or adults at the beach either. I wouldn't commercialize a clothed picture of my baby son.

I am not shocked when I see a nude child, whether in a picture or in real life, so for me it was an apropos analogy.

It would be a shame if anyone was cancelled (at the time or now) just because of a photo like this. It would be double shame if Nirvana was cancelled, they were a major inspiration for maybe a half of my generation. That baby's parents consented, so that's it.

> Bad is subjective

Counterpoint: http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/letmetouch.jpg

Homosexuality can be good, depending on your viewpoint. Same for religion. Maybe him refers to God.

> Geffen records wasn’t thrilled about a penis on the cover, even though it was a baby, and had prepared an alternate cover, Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say, "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile."

Quote above is from [0] which includes the backstory, and the fact that the now-grown child seems quite happy to have been involved. He even recreated it.

[0] https://937theriver.iheart.com/featured/derek-moore/content/...

What if the child wasn't happy with being involved? You can't give consent to such a thing if you're < 18. That's the very issue at hand.

As for Cobain's argument that anyone offended by that "must be a closet pedophile" that is just an ad hominem. The issue isn't whether someone's offended by it; its that a minor does not and cannot give consent about commercialization of their naked picture.

While I'm of the opinion that people should be able to grow up with the mindset that their bodies are nothing to be ashamed of, it might be best for someone to decide if they want any particular naked photo published after they're of age.

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