Kanye West: BANNED? Not So Fast

Kanye West has been caught in a fib.

The controversial rapper unveiled the cover to his upcoming album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, online over the weekend and promptly revealed that the album has already been banned by Walmart. The cover is a painting of West naked on a couch with a nude, naked woman on top of him. I was left to wonder if the cover was really banned by the folks at Walmart or if West was once again deftly stirring up some more controversy in advance of the album and read on to find out that my instincts were right.

The Twitter-happy West Tweeted: "Banned in the USA!!! They don't want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!" He later added, "In the '70s album covers had actual nudity ... It's so funny that people forget that ... Everything has been so commercialized now."

A representative of Walmart provided a statement to our friends at EW that read: "We're excited about Kanye West's new album and we look forward to carrying it in our stores on November 22. As always, it's our standard practice to carry the edited parental advisory version. We did not reject the cover artwork and it was never presented to us to view."

Wow, so Walmart never saw it, much less rejected it, according to those statements. Either Kanye was fed some bad information or he was looking to stir up some more publicity, via stunts!

Do you think Kanye West is going too far?