COVER UP: The cover of the new...

COVER UP: The cover of the new Kool G. Rap & D.J. Polo album is pretty provocative: a staged photo of two black men, with the help of Dobermans, about to hang two white men.

Too provocative, in fact, for the Wherehouse store at the Beverly Connection shopping center.

After complaints from customers and employees about a promotional billboard of the album cover that was outside the store, the record chain arranged for the two white men to be painted over. “If the perception was that Wherehouse is supporting a racist theme, that’s all wrong,” said Bruce Jesse, a Wherehouse spokesman.

Tony Rivas, a partner in Tony Joni, the firm that works directly with record companies in the placement of the promotional art, says he also found the album cover objectionable, but that he was simply following through on a deal with the album’s distributor, California Record Distribution.

When Kool G. Rap found out about the Wherehouse whitewash, he was not happy. “My album was originally movie-formatted and the cover is a scene from my movie,” he explains. “If I didn’t want those people (the men in nooses) on the cover, I wouldn’t have put them there in the first place. I don’t feel that anybody has any business censoring my album-cover artwork.”