Posted on 09/12/2001 9:12:23 PM PDT by Paul Atreides
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Striking a macabre note, a new album cover by hip-hop band The Coup -- whose music has a strong anti-capitalist bent -- had until recently depicted the World Trade Center exploding, the band's label said on Wednesday.
``We changed the artwork as soon as we saw what had happened,'' said Daria Kelly, director of sales for 75 Ark, the band's label.
Kelly said the picture, which eerily shows group member ''Boots'' Riley holding a detonator in front of the exploding towers, was yanked from the San Francisco-based company's Web site at (http://www.75ark.com) by 9:30 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, hours after two hijacked airliners actually smashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers and brought them down, possibly causing thousands of deaths.
Kelly said the artwork was done about two months ago for the band's upcoming album, ``Party Music,'' which features a single called ``5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO'' and is due to hit stores on November 6.
``We were going to print them this week. Thank goodness we hadn't yet printed them,'' she said, adding that the new album cover would probably just bear the band's logo.
While the label quickly moved to delete the image -- which shows explosions in the towers at about the same level as the actual blasts -- the picture has begun to circulate on the Internet and generate a lot of reaction.
It was featured Wednesday on lifestyle-culture Web site at (http://www.ammocity.com) accompanied by the following message: ''The album cover for hip-hop group 'The Coup' manages to even outweird the quotes from Nostradamus doing the email rounds today.''
Kelly said she had not received any e-mails about the cover, noting it hadn't been circulated by the label very much.
``We just started press about a month ago,'' she said describing the Oakland, Calif.-band's music as focusing on the ''destruction of corporate America.''
The band, considered among the more overtly political rap bands, was formed in the early 1990s. Lead rapper/producer Boots Riley, whose real name is Raymond Riley, was involved in political activism before becoming a musician, according to music industry sources.
Released in 1993, the Coup's debut album ``Kill My Landlord'' was a highly charged blend of leftist resistance and 70s funk, which received wide critical praise.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this strong anti-capitalist doesn't give his music away.
Why put a picture of the WTC being blown up on there in the first place? To incite someone to do it?
By the way, what the hell is "hip-hop"? Sounds like some sort of game that preschoolers might play. (Actually, it is "music" which requires a simple beat, a VERY simple rhyme scheme, and a vocabulary of AT MOST 400 words- half of which are obscenities).
Very, very bad music.
This album cover was posted to the internet on July 19, 2001! It depicts the World Trade Center in the exact state we all saw it in after the attacks yesterday. The band, The Coup (a sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in positions of authority), displays the Red Communist Star representing Socialism on the cover.
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