Fox, in it’s usual way, turned a great idea into a total dud.  The Top Twelve Sexiest Album covers of all time.  Oh Yeah!  I’m up for that.  So, imagine my feelings as I started my romp down memory lane:

That’s #1.  Topical, but ok.  Not a #1, but passable.  Not sure how many young girls will now start dressing in barbed wire, or boys pushing their girlfriends to.  OK, so I gotta admit, we’re off to a bad start.  This is ok, but not sexy, and not so hot it will start a trend.

But, then things picked up a little:

Now we’re talking.  That’s dangerous.  That’s sexy.  Now I get it, we’re going backwards, counting down.  If that’s #11, then WHAT could be #10?

That’s not what I was expecting.  OK, so they’ve got a thing for Shania Twain.  That’s understandable.  But, well, gee……..

Sexy?  I don’t get it.

OK, so Carly Simon had boobs for a while.  That’s never been a secret ( heh, we all get it now, the album’s called No Secrets. ).  She was kinda sexy for a while, but this was not her best pose.

When Bruce started, he was cool as all get-out.  Once the hits started pouring in, he thought he was a sex symbol.  This picture culminated his career sell-out.  Young girls might have enjoyed seeing an adult butt in a pic, but for the rest of us, it was kinda sad seeing what Bruce, “Born to Run” Springsteen had resorted to.

OK, this is where this thing totally jumps the shark.  Now, ya gotta understand, at certain times, Madonna has been about as sexy as anyone on this planet could get.  Obviously, this is not one of those moments.  She went from the hyper-fun partying virgin you knew was lying, who was sexy as heck, and then watched her morph into this freak dominatrix with missiles for boobs grabbing her crotch at any given moment.  Not sexy.  From there she just seems to have turned into plastic.  She doesn’t seem real any more.  She definitely is not sexy.  Scary, yes, sexy, no.  She’s on the list for sure, but this album ain’t it.

I am completely clueless here.  Is he the first black guy to show off how buff he is when he’s singing romantic lullabies?  Shirtless guys staring at the camera just never did anything for me.  Next.

WTF?  I mean, seriously here, WTF?

Much better.  However, once again, right person, wrong pose.

Well, once again, not my specialty here.  However, this black guy posing shirtless showing how buff he is when he croons lullabies does predate the other one by about 20 years.  I respect the originals.  I usually don’t the imitations.  So, that pretty much knocks both of these off the chart.  Once again, right person, wrong pose.

Pathetic.  Completely and totally useless.  Once again, Fox has found a way to relegate something worth debating, nee, fighting for, and rendered it completely moot.  Let’s try a REAL stab at this issue, shall we?  I’m not going to have a #1.  But, I will have a hall of fame in general.  Others can be added later.  This topic was taboo early on.  The guys, black or white, were polished and nattily dressed.  The women wore proper length dresses.  But, with the 60′s, as with everything else, standards collapsed.  Expectations were eroding to on-demand gratification.  Bands started pushing buttons.  First pushing topics, and then sexuality.  Finally the wall pretty much completely around 1970.  IMO, this is the one that pretty much blasted the wall completely:

Subtle huh?  From that point on, nothing was taboo.  It took a while to address all the issues, but this one I think is what got it all going.  Now, at this point, bands occasionally tossed out sexual innuendo, sexuality, or whatnot.  But a couple of bands re-defined things once again by totally selling sexuality.  The first I can think of was:

Roxy thrived on it.  Another band that pushed the envelope early on was Boxer:

Not so subtle.  Other performers started pushing the button in other ways to their suiting:

Early on, the Playboy bunny turned new wave performer Debbie Harry turned all the guys on.   Her clothes always seemed to be on the verge of falling off.  Her sultry looks, pert mouth, blonde hair, and well, curves, made her perfect for everything but what we expected at the time:

If you didn’t get it then, you won’t now.

Other chicks were enjoying the liberation of being able to sell something besides their good voices.  Madonna?  Remember her, the hard candy dominatrix?  This is how she got it going:

She  was the virgin who liked to party all night.

Remember the second shirtless buff black guy staring at the camera?  He wouldn’t stop there:

First he ditched his pants, and then he ditched everything else:

Before long you had people appealing to all kinds of different types of sexuality:

That one definitely caused a lot of guilty feelings. Baby One More Time?  On her knees?  For crying out loud.

This one turned on only one person on the planet.  He’s dressed like her ever since.

In the early 80′s, they figured out the best way to score lots of babes was to look like them.  Comparing blush was the quickest way to get in some babe’s pants.  By the 90′s, all of this was getting kinda mundane.  It went from having a sexy babe on the cover, to how many you could get:

It had gotten so mundane in fact, people worried about the lyrics.  Now it’s gotten to the point people don’t even worry about the music.  They don’t even worry about lyrics.  The biggest concern seems to be getting a good pose:

Yup, now we’ve got shirtless babes in black lingerie starting directly at the camera.  Which reminds me of another one lately:

Yup, a shirtless babe in black staring directly at the camera.  Which reminds me of:

A shirtless babe dressed in, well, not black, staring at the camera.  I’m sorta ok with this as a trend so far:

A shirtless babe, wearing too much, staring at the camera.  That’s Scarlet Johansson tho.

Not sure who this is supposed to be appealing to:

Food fetishes I suppose.  But, clam dip’s just not for me.  If you think it couldn’t get any more over than this, remember this one?

We all KNEW what she was doing.  Bad girl.

I could go on and on and on.  Every year I think something like 4,200,001 sexy album covers are created.  Everyone I’m sure has a Top 12 favoritest smoking hot album covers list.  I’d love to see some others here.  In the meantime, here’s my list and few to boot: