- Joined
- Sep 20, 2018
This is one of those "what were they THINKING" moments, wherein merely attempting to discuss what was clearly a carefully prepared and staged photoshoot for the purposes of making an album cover expressly for pure shock value will get you strung up by your ears. In the eyes of the law, the album cover was deemed "not porn", although one has to take into account the backdrop of the late 70's and early 80's being basically the heydey of every major predator in entertainment one immediately thinks of (Roman Polanski, Gary Glitter, Jimmy Savile, et al.) before they were exposed in a cluster in the late 90's and 2000's.No penetration happening, sexual organs are covered, so yeah, not CP.
If you are a drug-addled rockstar in that era, the thought process makes a disturbing amount of sense: "lol we're soooo transgressive, let's put a naked kid on our album to generate controversy, any publicity is good publicity, people will be talking about us, and it's like so artistic because it's centered around the main them of our album, we're so cool and smart" *bangs of age (probably) groupie*. The fact that the album cover now is a group photo of the band is proof that they themselves (and their record label) thought it to be at the very least in bad taste after they sobered up. Someone doing a video essay on the thing would probably be able to get away with using the old album cover as a thumbnail (and likely would, if only to generate infinite ragebait in the comments for engagement as users pour in to express their outrage).
I contend that were it not being used as a very public album cover (and Scorpions didn't strike it big with Rock You Like A Hurricane), it would have been deemed CP. Stripped of context, even the Bri*ish deemed it to have "erotic posing", which would be sufficient for whoever had such an image in their possession to be raked over the coals at a bare minimum. In classic Bri*ish fashion, the other big reason they didn't outlaw it outright was to prevent a Streisand effect of it were it indeed illegal. lol, lmao even
That being said, you still gave the rhetorical equivalent of "not touching you, not touching you", so kys nonce.