Reason For Censorship: Dog Penis. The line on what constitutes indecency in commercial artwork is a thin one. No artist knows that quite like David Bowie. Diamond Dogs found Bowie on the tail end of his Ziggy Stardust persona, so he'd already endured several controversies surrounding his image. (He'd been lambasted a few years earlier for wearing a dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World.) But the Diamond Dogs artwork showed an even bigger faux pas: his penis. Well, okay, it wasn't really his penis. It was actually just an artist's rendering of what Bowie would look like as a half-man/half-dog hybrid, with the cross-breed's genitalia subtly included on the back of the sleeve. But people kind of lost their minds over it and very few copies of the cover made it to stores with the genitals intact. People who were offended at this Bowie album probably didn't really know what they were offended at, exactly. The fact that there was a hint of a dog's genitalia on the cover? The fact that the dog genitalia belonged to David Bowie? Whatever the reason, it was ultimately decided that the offending body part would be shaded in, so that a person couldn't immediately infer what gender the dog-man was supposed to be. Which, honestly, probably helped further Bowie's androgynous persona even further. Are there any album covers you think were wrongfully censored? Let us know in the comments!
