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

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

voting neil young for its resemblance to vintage vertigo comics house ads

that veruca salt cover is genuinely good, never seen it before

i can't hate flannel, just the ugly flannel. also '90s hair was some terrible shit vs the usually mocked '80s hair.

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.

― emil.y

I don't know what you're saying emily. Being female is great.

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

― marcos, Thursday, April 17, 2014 2:50 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― mattresslessness, Thursday, April 17, 2014 2:53 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I bought this cd used, and for years I thought this was the actual cover art:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/lp/lp10h.jpg

Which I actually like quite a bit more than the real cover art, though it also still very much fits in this thread

At its best - Courtney, Kurt, Steve Turner from Mudhoney's vintage shirts, Winona in Reality Bites - grunge style was great and its no surprise that elements of it have been revived. The really horrible fashion was the kind of vaguely bohemian, rustic yet modern style which seemed to be a reaction against 80s garishness: loads of earth tones (various shades of brown and snotgreen), floaty floral dresses, baggy suits, chunky shoes, neo-hippy bracelets and necklaces... That combined with 'grunge' around 93-94 - thinking people like Crash Test Dummies, Counting Crows. Then there was that ghastly designer hippy-grunge thing you got with 4 Non Blondes. Oh dear oh dear. That aesthetic went into artwork and videos too.

voting neil young for its resemblance to vintage vertigo comics house ads

sooo otm

there are worse ones here but it's not like i ever lived w/ that korn album so neil got my vote though really i kinda like it's awful 'lol 90s' vibe, it's his 'lol 90s' album

sonic youth seems fitting, a not very close approximation of 80s cool, i love some of their 90s covers though - washing machine, goo, dirty.

that sugar cover has presented me from ever owning that album.

The Beck cover is amazing and complements the music perfectly

The worst is either Bush or Bad Religion, and they're both entirely loathsome. Might vote Bush - it's fucking disgusting actually

i feel like the entire rykodisc aesthetic led to shitty covers. i don't know why. maybe the covers weren't any worse than other labels and it was just the sickly doctor's office waiting room green of the jewel cases that did it.

american thighs cover is gorgeous imo

yeah that's a real good cover

in a weird way i kinda respect the nirvana mtv one, w/ that album it'd be so easy to overplay the reverance and make it seem like 'here stands a testament to tragedy and genius', god knows that album actually played that way in the culture that winter, like the pop equivalent of playing an old answering machine message or staring at old photos, but the cover works as a rebuke as if to say 'yeah it's very sad and the music is great which is nice but let's be clear - this is a cash-in'.

vitalogy cover and art kinda secretly blew my mind as a 12 yo

never really thought about it before but the 'exile in guyville' cover is pretty bad.

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