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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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/

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

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".

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