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Music

Get Ready to Smiling Face With Open Mouth, This Website Makes Everything Look Emojinal

We used it to transform some album covers into mosaics of poo and watermelons, but you can also waste shit loads of your time too!

Ever since Oneohtrix Point Never made that emoji music video and then someone shamelessly ripped it off for a viral Beyoncé tribute, we’ve been searching for further ways in which we can squeeze the cute little bastards into every orifice of pop culture.

Data analysts legitimately employ people and pay them wages to determine statistics about how eggplant is the most popular emoji in Nevada; the world breathed out a sigh of relief when different skin types were finally recognised as though it provided a key breakthrough in solving racial prejudice; while Russia's media regulators are desperately trying to ban any that they deem remotely LGBT.

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Fuck, I mean, we even declared emoji a language. Can you believe we call it a language? The same way we laugh at Victorian doctors who prescribed heroin for chesty coughs, or wonder why they filled the Hindenburg with hydrogen, our children’s children’s children will look back on the day we declared emoji a language as evidence that everything else we did should be hastily discredited. “How can we continue recognising the Higgs boson as a standard model of particle physics,” your ten foot android neek descendent will say at a science conference in 3050, “when this came from a generation who conversed using a small illustration of a smiling poop?”

The truth is, we’ll be dead then anyway, and emojis are cute as hell. So fuck our children’s children’s robotic children. Let’s just keep developing our emojinal intelligence any way we can. Is it not what makes us most #human?

That's why I've spent the last 2 hours of my paid office job going about important business like this.

Yes, that is the FKA Twigs album cover remade with emojis. This is the handy work of Eric Andrew Lewis, a web developer at the New York Times, who has created a website where you can drop any image in, and have it converted it into a detailed mosaic of emojis, each one sharply colour coded to represent your original picture, but in a flurry of cats, moons, waves, globes, ghosts, cherries, lollies, broken hearts, blue hearts, piles of poop, surfers, trumpets, snowmen and dudes in turbans. What's that sound? Oh, that's just the sound of all the fun you're about to have, echoing through time.

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You can do it with any picture you like, but we've been throwing in music cover art, because that's the best way we could shoehorn this invention into being a music story which we could therefore cover without looking like brash internet freeloaders.

Let's get into this. Here's Nicki Minaj's Anaconda. Carefully note her peeping eyes, and the purely incidental positioning of a chocolate donut emoji.

Dark Side of the Millenial Moon.

On Kanye's MBDTF, Japanese flags are used to detail the contours of the human body.

De La Soul, on the other hand, looks like the most beautiful council funded flower display your quaint village green has ever seen.

And King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King looks like the most disturbing flower display your quaint village green has ever seen.

Of course, like with everything in life, this website has its limitations. Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band record, for instance, looks like something a small child would do at school and then the teacher would take him to one side and ask if everything was okay at home.

Has anyone ever illustrated Prince more honestly, than as watermelons, cakes, and heart-sealed envelopes? I doubt very much.

Here's Limp Bizkit: offered without comment.

And finally, one of the most controversial album covers of all time: Now 48, imagined with a frightening army of Face Without Mouth.

Enjoy that, did you? Of course you did. Now go forth, waste the next 3 hours of your lives, and tweet us your favourite creations @NoiseyMusic so we can all careen towards pointlessness hand in hand.

Follow Joe on Twitter.