The issue, of course, was the danger of family-friendly big-box retailers refusing to carry the album, which could result in a 10% drop in album sales. As the paper found, “West was strongly urged to use alternate art, source conceded, but added that West ‘was told if he wanted to do it, the label would stand behind him.'” In an awesome bit of reporting, the LA Times spoke to people at West’s record label and learned that the issue wasn’t as black-and-white as it would first appear. The only problem, it turns out, is that the cover was not actually banned. ”So Nirvana can have a naked human being on they cover but I can’t have a PAINTING of a monster with no arms and a polka dot tail and wings.” ”I wanna sell albums but not at the expense of my true creativity.” ”In the 70s album covers had actual nudity… It’s so funny that people forget that… Everything has been so commercialized now.” West’s followers were soon inundated with a classic Kanye Twitter rant: (Or, again in Kanye-speak, “They don’t want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!” What can we say? We love Kanye-speak.) Once West did tweet the album cover, the issue became clear: the proposed artwork was a bizarre oil painting depicting a human man engaged in intercourse with a nude winged creature. ( See pictures from the recent life of Kanye West.) Or, spoken in the unique authorial voice West uses on the Internet, “Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!!! Ima tweet it in a few…” Yesterday, the rapper/exemplar of our age took to Twitter to make an important announcement: The artwork for his upcoming album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, had been banned. Kanye West needs to take his own advice and start tweeting like he has some type of respect for himself. Follow would have thought that Kanye West was the type to exaggerate things?

Kanye west dark fantasy cover art