E!News : A nude image of Katy Perry graces the cover of her latest album, “Teenage Dream,” which was released on Aug. 24. What’s shocking is that this is not so shocking. In the era of Lady Gaga’s nearly nude crowd surfing at Lollapalooza and Miley Cyrus’ underage stripper-pole dancing, Perry’s CD cover seems just another in a long line of attention-grabbing tactics by a mainstream pop artist.


Although artists have been selling sex since before Elvis shook his hips, in-your-face sexuality has become so much a part of popular music that Kylie Minogue and Bananarama’s former producer Mike Stock has called much of today’s music “pop chart porn.”

It wasn’t always this way. Album covers on which an artist appeared nude once seemed like tactless bids for publicity — and those sometimes backfired. Alannah Myles, for example, saw her career tank in the U.S. after a No. 1 hit when she pulled a similar move in the 1990s. (msnbc)