Maybe when it comes to Kanye West, a little censorship could be a good thing.
Now, considering that the only source of this information comes from Kanye’s twitter feed, there is no way to know all the details of the situation, but last night Kanye sent of a deluge of tweets, starting with, “Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!!! Ima tweet it in a few...”
That tweet was later followed by tweets saying, “Banned in the USA!!! They don't want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!” and “In all honesty ... I really don't be thinking about Wal-Mart when I make my music or album covers #Kanyeshrug!”
The proposed cover, for Kanye’s upcoming album entitled My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (who knew that Kanye was now a member of My Chemical Romance?), can be seen as a Twitpic here (slightly NSFW), and it certainly is, well, interesting -- but interesting in the way your girlfriend would describe your new obsession with free jazz as ‘interesting': The alleged cover depicts a demonic-looking figure being mounted by a naked, armless, winged female with a polka-dotted tail.
While we presume that Kanye ran into trouble with the cover because of the nudity on it, it remains to see whether the artwork was actually banned. The L.A. Times talked to an industry source at Def Jam who said that they were afraid of a potential boycott by big market retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, although it was added that West, “was told if he wanted to do it, the label would stand behind him.”
Kanye also added in his Twitter, “In the 70s album covers had actual nudity... It's so funny that people forget that... Everything has been so commercialized now.”
But if commercialization means that we never have to see the likes of this again, maybe its best to leave the nudity back in the ‘70’s where it belongs. At the very least, it leaves us very excited to see what Kanye comes up with next.
