Billboard magazine released a list of the greatest album covers of all time. The winner was “pop art pope” Andy Warhol for the album cover The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967).

In 1967, when it was first released, the album was not at all popular. Although today you consider it a huge, musical achievement – its “aggressive” sound and its subversive lyrics are harbingers of many musical trends even today – at that time it had not found a mass audience.

Behind the scenes, Andy Warhol was instrumental in the creation of the album. As the band’s manager, Warhol was the one who put The Velvet Underground in touch with Nico. They even took part in his performances Warhol “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. Even his involvement, however, did little to benefit the band’s commercial prospects.

An album and a cover that divided

According to the iconic artist’s biographer, Blake Gopnik, “The Velvet Underground and Nico” only reached No. 171 on the Billboard 200 charts, while its sales between 1967 and 1969 brought in little profit for Warhol’s management company. , Warve. The album’s music was considered “indecent”—the lyrics referred to drug use and sadomasochism—so many radio stations refused to play the songs.

However, some believe that an additional reason for the “unpopularity” was the album cover itself, a pop-art image whose ambiguous meaning was exaggerated more than it should have been.

Andy Warhol designed the cover of ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ to include an interactive element. You could peel off the banana skin to reveal the image of a pink fruit underneath. “Peel her slowly and see” was written in small print on the cover. For Gopnik it referred to the “male” genitalia “connecting the Velvets to the radical queer culture represented by the ‘Factory’ (Warhol’s workshop)”.

While, for the band’s frontman, Lou Reed, “the banana transformed it (the album) into an erotic art show.”

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