Dis Cover: Megan Thee Stallion - Megan

So, Megan The Stallion is releasing her third studio album, Megan. And the album cover which was shared to announced its release is terrible. So terrible, that I don’t get how anybody could genuinely like this.

If you haven’t seen it in full already, then just take a look and judge for yourself.

Megan Thee Stallion - Megan | Hot Girl Productions LLC

Real flop girl shit.

This cover was shot by David LaChapelle, who I spoke about in detail in a Random J(unk) Mail post. The long and short of it, is that he did some truly amazing shoots in the early 2000s. But between this and those Ice Spice album covers—which I might do a post on—he has clearly lost his touch.

There is not a single good thing about this album cover. It looks like AI art for a start. But everything about the composition of this shot—the lighting, the set design (both physical and virtual)—it’s all terrible. Why is Megan all the way off to the side, with her face in the bottom corner? Why is the room taking up so much of the shot for it to have no significance? What is with the M? The album title is Megan. Not M. And, yes. I know ‘Megan’ starts with the letter M. But if you slap an M on the cover in such a fashion that it takes up the entire shot and draws your attention, then it reads as though ‘M’ is the album title. So why not just have ‘Megan’ on the cover? Or better still, have it be textless. The M helps fill out the space, but that’s a problem David LaChapelle created for himself by having Megan all the way off to the side of the shot. LaChapelle shared an M-less version of the album cover via Instagram. And whilst it looks better, it still look horrid. Also, why is Megan now a butterfly on the cover of an album, after three singles where the concept was snakes?

I’m exhausted just talking about the ways in which this cover just makes no sense. It’s rubbish.

Megan Thee Stallion revealed that Megan will feature more multiple covers. And thankfully, the second one is much better. But it is confusing me greatly. Because I do not understand why Megan would even bother entertaining that first cover, when the second one is so much better and aligns with the visual concepts for the single arts, which was snakes.

Megan Thee Stallion - Megan | Hot Girl Productions LLC

 

Metamorphosis. Rebirth. I get the symbolism of the butterfly. But it just made no sense coming after three singles with snake themed names, snake themed cover arts and snake themes in the music videos. Less so in “Boa”. But there is still snake shit in that video, and of course, there is the song title. So to then flip to a butterfly for the album cover when you can still very much convey renewal and rebirth with a snake, which were such prominent themes of the music video for “Cobra”—it made not one lick of sense. 

As we can see from the second album art, staying with snakes not only still gets across the theme of of renewal, change and rebirth across, but it makes more sense with what has been the most prominent visual theme of Megan’s releases for the past three songs. The music video for “Hiss” even featured a shot of her about to emerge out of an egg, and the last shot of the music video for “Cobra” was eggs. So this second cover art just works every which way. But unfortunately, we also get that damn M again. Megan did eventually post an M-less variant of this second cover. And again, I don’t understand why somebody would look at the shot and say ‘Do you know what this needs? A giant M slapped on it’.

Thankfully, the standard album cover, which will also be used for streaming will feature a variant of the second cover and there is no damn M.

Megan Thee Stallion - Megan | Hot Girl Productions LLC

That butterfly album cover should not be printed for physical copies of Megan.

David LaChapelle did not shoot the second album cover, hence why the shot looks good. But interestingly, he did do a shoot with this emerging out of an egg theme theme back in 1998 with Pamela Anderson. And what makes that butterfly mess even more confusing, is that he actually did shoot some cool album cover worth shots for Megan a short while back, which were very much on theme.

Megan Thee Stallion needs a better creative team who will make better choices. Because that butterfly album cover never shoulda left the moodboard, let alone been shot and approved. But at least she came around with the other covers. Kinda.