Images purporting to show Saudi Arabian versions of Mariah Carey's album covers have recently appeared on the web.
Mediabum.com says that "Because of the laws over there her album covers had to be touched up to be made less sexy." Maybe. It sounds like something that would be done in Saudi Arabia. However, the lack of a clear source for these images makes me suspicious. They could equally well have been created by somebody playing around with photoshop. (And why is there no arabic script on these Saudi Arabian covers?) (And incidentally, I just read that Mariah Carey has 17 Number One singles, tying the number that Elvis had. This is odd because I'm unable to name a single song by her. With 17 #1 songs, I figured I'd know at least one of them.)
Comments
i still respect the guy for his achievements
If it was photoshopped, it was probably done on purpose by the companies who sell the cd's.
http://www.megastar.com.sa/
The website is extremely slow. In the above images the retouching looks very poor, but that doesn't necessarily mean the images are hoaxes, just that they were done cheaply, and they might be semi-official bootlegs.
My personal feeling is that if Island records was going to do this kind of thing it would be quicker and more effective to find simply crop out Mariah's body and zoom in on her face. Indeed, the majority of the album covers on the front page of Megastar use this format; they are close-ups of the artist's faces. And the Arabic music CDs I have seen are much the same, close-ups of people's face. I assume the album covers were originally done with Photoshop, and it would be the work of a moment to modify them. I also assume it would be cheaper to print off a few thousand CD booklets than it would be to hire some temps to airbrush the booklets.
Nonetheless, reading through:
http://users.aol.com/saudijobs/detail.html
(might not work in Mozilla) it does seem reasonable that Mariah's arms and legs would be covered up; i.e. it seems reasonable that this would happen in Saudi Arabia, not that it seems reasonable per se. Famously, women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, not even tourists.
I've never been impressed with her. I find her extremely annoying. I agree with you Alex, I find it hard to believe she's had that many No.1 hits, although I can recall a few of them that I'd like to forget.
1. editing of clothing
2. adding/subtracting fold lines
3. changing hue/saturation/brightness
the images are pixel for pixel the same in artifacting, at least as close as you can get with jpeg compression
this picture of a Britney Spears album cover.
Compared with the original picture, a less revealing shirt has obviously been photoshopped in, although it was done slightly better than the Mariah Carey covers. So there you go.
The only thing I find difficult to believe about these retouching jobs is how bad they are. They look pretty cheesy, but I can definitely imagine a country like Saudi Arabia only permitting album covers with subdued or altered graphics of the originals