Adam Lambert Wanted His Album Cover To Look Like That, Honest

The artwork for Adam Lambert's new album For Your Entertainment has already kicked up one hell of a fuss.

Why? It's simple. It looks like one of those awful transfer-print T-shirts that people who like wolves buy from tatty market stalls. It looks like something that the redneck wife of a professional wrestling fan would airbrush onto the back of her leather jacket. It looks like a poster that someone you hate would buy. It's bizarre.

But it's OK, because Adam Lambert says it's all deliberate. Unfortunately it means that Kris Allen's new album artwork will now probably show him covered in glitter and bumming a unicorn, but we'll deal with that when we have to.

Adam Lambert clearly hasn't read the rulebook. You know, the rulebook which says that the debut album from all American Idol graduates should come with artwork where the performer looks approachable and friendly. The rulebook which very specifically says that the debut album from all American Idol graduates should most definitely not come with artwork that makes them look like a naked genderless sex alien who suffers from debilitating migraines.

And yet that's what the artwork to Adam Lambert's forthcoming album For Your Entertainment is. Look, here it is all close-up…



Admit it, when you first saw the artwork you thought it was a hoax. You thought it was a hoax knocked up by a 12-year-old girl with a second-hand VHS copy of the 1986 Grace Jones movie Vamp and a Blingee account, didn't you? You thought that not even Adam Lambert – the man who used American Idol to sing Ring Of Fire in the style of a creepy Middle-Eastern snake charmer and part-time date-rapist – would think of becoming a topless, blue-haired version of the Sarah Jessica Parker character from Flight Of The Navigator on the sleeve of his first album.

But he has. And he's done it on purpose, as he told his followers on Twitter yesterday:

'Thank you to those who appreciate and understand that the album cover is deliberately campy. It's an omage to the past. It IS ridiculous… For those that don't get it: oh well… Glad to have gotten your attention. androgyny. Rock n Roll… *homage. When's Twitter adding spell check?'

That's awfully nice of Adam Lambert, but we're not really sure it counts as androgynous. Not unless the definition of androgyny has expanded to include men who look as if they've woken up in a ditch on the day of their wedding and realised that their stag night prank involved being stripped, dyed and eyebrow-waxed, while simultaneously having their hand glued to their own face.

But nice try anyway. And if the album cover has walked the line between amazing and terrible so easily, then God knows what Adam Lambert's album itself will be like, right Adam?

'[There's] a tune called 'Music Again' written by Justin Hawkins of the Darkness!'

OK, we take that back, sorry. It'll be terrible. As you were.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

//