Metallica Makes It To Rolling Stone’s Worst Album Covers List

The list included albums from names such as Ted Nugent, Dolly Parton, Queen, Anthrax, and even Van Halen. In the 41st place in the list, Metallica’s self-titled album took place. The magazine wrote:

“When Spinal Tap put out an all-black album cover for ‘Smell the Glove’ in the movie ‘This Is Spinal Tap,’ it was intended as parody of rock-star idiocy — ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black’ — not a creative brief. Metallica’s version of ‘Smell the Glove’ (usually called ‘The Black Album’) gussied up the blackness just a little, with some matte-vs.-gloss images that didn’t really work.”

In 1991, Metallica moved away from the elaborate artwork and titles of their previous albums and chose something more minimalist: a simple black cover.

Lars Ulrich came up with the idea early on. According to Mick Wall’s biography, Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, Ulrich was flipping through heavy metal magazines and noticed how similar all the album ads looked with their cartoon characters and violent themes. The drummer wanted to keep it as distant from the same themes as possible.

So, the only decorations on the ‘Black Album”s cover were the band’s small logo in the top left and a coiled snake in the bottom right. The snake was a nod to the Gadsden flag’s ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ motto, used during the American Revolutionary War and later by different military units.

Though there are many different albums with not-so-good-looking covers, Limp Bizkit’s hit album ‘Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water’ took the first place.

The magazine wrote the following about the album:

“Five Gollum-looking dudes lolling around on a bed of nitrate-infused meat? Sure, that’s a fair representation of Limp Bizkit. Following up on their breakthrough hit ‘Significant Other,’ the nu metal band leaned even harder into being repulsive — ‘chocolate starfish’ is a slang term for ‘*sshole,’ a nickname vocalist Fred Durst adopted with pride — as a substitute for an actual artistic philosophy. This cover (made by the band’s guitarist, Wes Borland) is both tacky and gross, but at least it works as a warning label: What you see is what you get.”