Phil fuckin' Anselmo. Pan-fuckin'-tera. Do-fuckin'-wn. Maybe it doesn't work best with Down, but whenever you think of Philip H. Anselmo, one word should come to mind: fuck. Maybe it's because it's the word Phil uses in about every other sentence when addressing the crowd at concerts, or maybe it's because it's the first thing that pops into your head when you listen to Pantera, Down, or any of Phil's thrashing, hammering, blood-racing, heart-pounding heavy metal music. That being said, there's no surprise that when looking at the cover for Phil's debut solo release, Walk Through Exits Only, the same word pulses its way into your head. But instead of it being that loud, raucous, pounding "fuck" you get when hearing "Fucking Hostile" on the radio, it's more of a "fuck?" – as in, "what the ef is Phil doing here? Is he praying, or is he pondering about walking through the entrance instead?" Before dissecting this album cover wrinkle by wrinkle, let's take a closer look at Phil and Co.'s past collaborations.
Pantera wasn't always the ass-whooping, riff-making, borderline-closeted-racist heavy metal band that they're known for today. Before Phil arrived with metal-guns-a-blazed, Pantera was an 80's glam metal band that probably couldn't even invoke fear in Gary Glitter. And with a name like Pantera –– Spanish for "panther" –– you'd assume that these guys aren't into big hair, bright makeup, or tight pants. Wrong. They were all about that. Especially evident on their debut, Metal Magic. Not to be confused with the video outlining the mystical attributes of the chemical elements in your 5th grade introduction to chemistry class, Metal Magic featured hits like "Ride My Rocket" and "Tell Me If You Want It." Looking at the track listing alone makes you wonder if you're reading titles for metal songs or chapter titles for a gay porn DVD. Regardless, the metal magic died out in 1990 as Pantera finally exchanged their wands for guitars without rounded edges, and their magic hats for cowboy hats on Cowboys From Hell.
Cowboys From Hell is not only a fundamental album on the thrash-metal timeline, it also serves as an elementary starting point for Photoshopping. It's no doubt the Quick Selection or Pen tools could have created an album like this in less than 10 minutes today, so for what it was worth in the 1990's, people were no doubt impressed at this level of photo manipulation magic –– er, mastery. These cowboys –– after having hopped off their magic dragons –– rode on into 1992 with arguably the most pain-inducing, gut-wrenching metal covers of all time, Vulgar Display of Power.
No other album cover bulldozes its way through you as 'Vulgar' does. At this point, Pantera had finally washed away all the glitter from their earlier days, yet their Photoshopping skills were not nearly as wizardly, as evident on their final album, Reinventing the Steel.
This cover is not only made up of maybe three layers at the most, but could potentially have been made in a design contest for a middle school graphic design class by a hormonal 14-year-old obsessed with fire and gets off on typing "naked" into Google image search when he's at his friends house.
Aside from Pantera, Phil's 20th-century work has been mostly dedicated to Down –– the blues-metal supergroup who sings about New Orleans and weed. Unlike Pantera, Down's album art is pretty standard for the metal community –– mostly black, grungy texture, the occasional cross or fleur-de-lis making an appearance. Alternatively, Phil's Walk Through Exits Only shows a middle-aged man who's had his fair share of microphones-to-the-head. Each Pantera album invokes a "fuck!" inside of you based off either its adrenaline-pounding images or poor Photoshopping skills. Yet his debut release embarks on a different kind of "fuck" –– more of a "fuck?" We question this because we're not sure what Phil is doing. At any moment, Phil can look up from his state of somber gaze and yell at us, "fuck!" or the image could pan out to reveal his somber gaze to be from a massive shit he's taking that requires utmost concentration (or because he just realized he ran out of toilet paper). This uncertainty requires us to keep the question mark, but all questions aside, Walk Through Exits Only proves one thing: Phil Anselmo ain't no wand-waving magician. He's a metal-making sorcerer.
