8 Bizarre Reasons Famous Album Covers Were Rejected

3. Kanye West Wanted Phoenix Sex

Kanye West having sex with an armless woman on the cover of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. What could possibly go wrong? West famously tweeted in 2010 that Walmart (among other retailers in the USA) had rejected the album cover, forcing Roc-A-Fella Records to change the cover before release.

Apparently the album was deemed inappropriate €“ not just because it contained nudity, but because the creature West was having sex with was actually a winged phoenix (therefore, not human). Kanye's response was to cite Nirvana's Nevermind as an example, reasoning that it featured actual nudity yet his album couldn't even feature a painted depiction. Lucky for Kanye, the artist George Condo had cooked up a bunch of other concepts (including Kanye's decapitated head impaled by a sword) so it wasn't hard to chose another one.