The Ugliest Album Art From Rolling Stone's "1994: The 40 Best Records From Mainstream Alternative's Greatest Year"

it's amazing how every single of of these albums with the possible exception of one or two are 50 cent bin fodder now.

that rem cover takes the cake for me. so embarrassing.

can't think of good New Young sleeve art tbh

'my era' should read 'this era' of course...

94 was a classic year for hip-hop. I wonder how the album covers stand up next to these? Doggystyle is hideous, while PE's Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is terrible, but kinda awesomely so with the Skeleton holding a gun to its head while the Klansman and the white politician laugh on...

Jesus Christ I can't believe Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is 20 years old! Every time I see that album title it seems so freshly horrible.

Weird how the first couple of REM albums have great, evocative covers, then they just go to shit, with maybe the exception of New Adventures (a bit boring, but Stipe's b&w photo is nice enough). I can see what they were going for with Monster's trashy aesthetic, but it's poorly executed. But it's less ugly than Green and Out Of Time's horrible washed out greens and yellows.

Illmatic and Ready To Die on the other hand... the fonts date them, but the images are pretty iconic.

can't think of good New Young sleeve art tbh

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:17 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think up through 'comes a time' neil young covers are pretty stellar

I think objectively Neil Young might be worse but I so intensely hate everything about the Offspring that I can't not vote for that

There are nice ones like On The Beach and Time Fades Away but Neil does tend to have an agressively cruddy aesthetic about half the time. Zuma literally gives you the finger.

http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/5561/neilyoungcrazyhorsezumayl0.jpg

I would argue that Ruby Vroom was the only good Soul Coughing cover. It's indeed slapdash but it feels at least semi-classic to me!

CASH is the best

I feel crazy saying this, but these are not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

You are crazy.

something about the cheap photoshop jobs of the time just seems kind of quaint to me as opposed to hideous

I think I might vote for the Sugar album because it is so half-assed and generic, although I may be choosing it in part because that album was such a disappointment to me when it came out.

i don't think i've ever realized how terrible the nirvana unplugged cover is. it's by no means the worst, it's just...taking a decent picture and making it as ugly as possible

Hard to choose between Neil and Sugar.

But this reminds me that I listened to Grace a few weeks ago for the first time in 8 or 9 years and wow, that album really did not age well at all.

honestly though, I can live with most of the top 20, plenty of them are even good or at least iconic. The bottom twenty start to get more into the ugly zone, but a lot of them embody the low budget DIY aesthetic that was in vogue at the time or just come across as lazy "product" without any pretense of trying to look interesting

neil's is generic 90s alt and stupid but ultimately pretty forgettable and harmless. (a lot neil's cover art is terrible but there are some absolutely classic covers too - all the ditch trilogy covers are awesome, i like zuma, too)

i hate the blur cover. all those dumb britpop bands that have a fucking logo. fuck off, blur sucks

sonic youth isn't too bad, ain't any worse than dirty, a thousand leaves, or nyc ghosts and flowers

otm, plus it had the different cards inside so you could change out the 'real' cover for a cooler one.

though as much as i hate oasis, that cover doesn't bother me

yeah I expected to have a more visceral reaction to these but I also maybe didn't realise how much they were burned into my brain

don't think I ever twigged Pisces Iscariot was a face :/

I actually think the top 10 albums on this list, excepting Soundgarden, have good album covers.

Voted Dookie -- I always hated that one.

Toadies seems way out in front as the worst to me, I can make a devil's advocacy argument for probly every other sleeve in the list

that Live one always really bothered me.

the Sugar one is not very notable but really sucks in its own overly graphic designed way

man talk about some rough fonts

the weezer one is actually pretty clean and iconic at least

dookie i never minded cuz it was sort of a ramones/mad magazine vibe i guess

Parklife has a great cover IMO

i wonder if mad men's betty character was inspired by the helmet cover

oasis and blur might be the best ones in here. The rest are all hilariously bad.

UMS otm

Neil young, offspring and beck are particularly ugly

yea beck is the worst i'm thinking. or toadies

i feel like the yeah yeah yeah's mosquito cover was created in 1993 and given to the band 20 years later

created for green jellÿ

lol

94 was a classic year for hip-hop. I wonder how the album covers stand up next to these?

Think I said this on another thread but the colour palette and font on Jeru the Damaja's The Sun Rises in the East (also '94) always reminded me of Sleeps With Angels (and vice-versa).

Bush's "16 Stone" by a mile in this category. Though I agree 1994 was Modern Rock's best year.

The ease with which I voted for that neil young album was astounding.

Soul Coughing one is pretty bad, although their 96 album's cover was even worse. Meat Puppets one is disappointing in the sense that most of their previous album covers had been cool surreal drawings by the band and then they suddenly flipped the script. idk voting for The Toadies i think.

Looks like some counting crows record that showed up in the record shop I used to run and would just never leave for long, maybe it's PTSD

it's funny how much the '90s seemed to be filled with a smug sense of superiority towards the aesthetic/design/clothing trends of the '80s (and even the '70s) but then you look back and almost everything was just hideous

Totally... The decade of "I just learned Photoshop!" design aesthetics

yeah i look at pics of folks from the '70s and '80s and it's just a cavalcade of awesome, the '90s is just everyone in flannels, it's not even a cliche really. ugly flannels, everywhere.

i mean and the dress shirts

http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/07/22/32/1910408/8/628x471.jpg

I dunno, I agree that a lot of these covers are pretty bad, and the dawn of the internet age (sorry for that phrase but not sure how else to describe it) was responsible for some terrible digital art, but I for one was thankful that there was an anti-fashion aesthetic while growing up. Being female is shit, being a teenage girl is even shitter, but actually feeling ~allowed~ to reject a whole swathe of that shitness was pretty important. So GO UGLY OVERSIZED FLANNEL SHIRTS I LOVE YOU.

yeah i'm not necessarily hating on grunge fashion. that was really the original normcore, rock kids wearing corduroy and lumberjack shirts instead of getting all decked out in leather jackets or whatever you were supposed to wear to be punk or metal before that.

40: live, "throwing copper" ::closes tab::

i can't, i just can't do this

A few of these covers aren't pleasing to the eye, but Sleeps With Angels is just fucking next-level shite.

A couple years later, but prime example of when Print Shop goes bad:

http://projectyuck.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/cult_of_ray.jpg

Toss-up between Without a Sound and Purple, went for STP in the end

Offspring's Smash hands down

this is pretty much all-my-first-albums-the-list. thanks to my shitty concept of time, i now know that 1994 was the year music first resonated with me. interesting.

also voted liz phair because what is that

the stp one is annoying but for whatever reason i find it sort of enjoyable to hate? whereas the korn and aic ones are terrible but also just make me angrier the more i think about bands like that playing domestic violence / violence towards children for shock value

that doesn't describe AiC whatsoever, wtf

violence towards flies for shock value, imo.

marketed to flies

idk the flies + detached body parts things strikes me as kinda violent

and i haven't like brushed up on my semiotics recently but i always thought the use of dolls in a lot of '90s imagery was trying to evoke tainted/dysfunctional childhood stuff

it was inspired by a science experiment Cantrell did in school iirc, where they had two jars of flies, underfed one, overfed the other, and the one that was overfed survived...and it apparently stuck w/ him for years.

their music was already too adult for kids anyway as it was primarily about heroin addiction. they were my fav band in high school but it wasn't lost on me how morbidly depressing the music was.

whereas Korn wrote fairly exclusively about that child abuse stuff on their first album and the cover kind of emphasized that even more.

I'm not certain that any of the visible body parts on the AiC cover are visibly detached.

yeah tbh i might just be reaching for more reasons to hate aic. i always assumed it was a doll

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huh i guess i never thought of sleeps with angels as particularly ugly
not great or anything just never seemed that noteworthy compared to some of these hideous ones

It's so very of its time.

Lol at Beck sounding like Bill O Riley with that "i didn't have ~time~ to be depressed when i was poor and hustlin" crap