One way of making sure your album sells is to make an album cover that gets banned. That way you are guaranteed to make a killing, every kid wants to own something that’s considered naughty. Here’s a few of the top banned album covers, some of which shouldn’t really have been banned and some of which certainly should.

1) Alice Cooper – Love It to Death (1973)

At first glance you may wonder why on earth this cover got banned at all? Well check the frontman’s crotch. He’s done the old thumb sticking through the fly routine. It’s hardly massively offensive is it? But it was enough to rattle the censors so they had it airbrushed out and ran with the one below:

2) The Beatles – Yesterday and Today (1966)

It’s a bit of a surprise to see the fab 4 in a list like this. They always seemed like such nice boys? For some unknown reason they decided to drape themselves with raw meat and mutilated dolls for this cover. They seem like they’re having a nice time though don’t they?

Radio DJs, uptight idiots that they were, kicked off so Capitol Records had to repackage it and resend it in fear that the radios wouldn’t play it. I mean, we’ve all eaten meat and lots of people have owned broken dolls, so what’s the big deal? Ridiculous. It ended up looking like this instead. Boring:

3) The Black Crowes – Amorica (1994)

This classic image was initially featured in Hustler’s 1976 U.S. Bicentennial issue. It didn’t cause much of a fuss in the hallowed pages of that illustrious magazine, but record shop owners were a different breed. The record company got edgy and went with this homogenised and frighteningly dull replacement:

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