YMMV / Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Once you get past a cover that meant plenty of record-stores would outright refuse to stock the album, you have to deal with the fact that the album itself is just two people goofing around in a house, pounding on instruments and screaming at each other. Lennon fans expecting real rock music were deeply disappointed.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: To this day, the album is best known for the fact that its cover depicts Lennon and Ono stark-naked, forcing distributors to sell it in a brown paper bag.
• Out of the Ghetto: This was Lennon's first effort at breaking out of the popular music ghetto, by releasing an album of tape loops, screaming, random bashing on instruments, etc., inspired by his new girlfriend's background in the US and European avant-garde art scene. It didn't really work too well, because most of his fans didn't want him to break out of the ghetto in the first place, while people who were from the US and European avant-garde scene tended to regard it as an album's worth of rather amateurish bonking noises by two people who didn't really know what they were doing. ^note A comparable but more authentic product of the European avant-garde at the time would be something like The Crypt, a recording of a 1968 concert by the British improvising group AMM, which in terms of duration, harshness and sheer confrontational noise makes Two Virgins sound like outtakes from The Goon Show.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Nearly all discussion about the album focuses on the cover, very little about what's actually recorded on it. It even overshadowed George Harrison's album Wonderwall Music, released the week before, despite that album selling better and getting much more favourable reviews.

---