So Mr. Menon and his Magic Marker sniffing team of solvent snorting censors have been busy with the cover art of the Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare, a most enjoyable collection of songs from those highly celebrated young Northern chaps.
The Menon magic appears to have been necessitated by some clever inner art that takes everyday objects and makes them appear rude, although I don't really know because the marker has done its work well. I have to confess to being irritated by this: I bought a product in good faith only to find that it has been wilfully vandalised and I do think that it would be better if this had not been the case. They wouldn't like it if I put splotches of marker all over their walls and toilets, would they? The least they could do is put a sticker on the outside of the (shrink wrapped) box saying 'This product has been intentionally damaged to protect your morals' or something of the sort. Then at least I'd know to buy it from Amazon instead of the local Virgin shop.
It's not as if the effort isn't rendered pointless through inconsistency. We have Buddha Bar albums in Virgin with the Buddha blacked out, yet Dubai's Grosvenor Hotel sports its very own Buddha Bar in the real. We have a sly bit of Arctic rudery obliterated while 'Tokyo: the sex, the city, the music' is on sale with a topless girl on the front cover. And George Bataille's The Story of the Eye is on sale in the bookshops here: as neat a piece of corruption as you'll find pasted to a spine.
Trawling the web to find out what sparked Magic Menon's ministrations, I did discover that bands are now issuing press releases to announce they have revealed their album art as part of their new release teaser campaigns. Oh, the cynicism...
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