Hip Hop Album Art as an Artform
A friend recently sent me a great website that featured someone replicating classic hip hop albums covers with Legos:
Hip Hop Album Covers - Lego Style!
Check out the original link here: Lego Hip Hop Album Covers. As I was scrolling through the list of diverse hip hop album covers, a thought dawned upon me. One of my favorite things to do after I buy a new CD (yes, I still buy CDs that I like) is to listen to it while reading the linear notes and stare at the album cover. Although thoughtful album art is definitely not unique to the genre of hip hop, I searched through my memory and found a couple I really liked:
Love this cover because of the sense of desolation it gives you, which is fully expected...given the album title and its complex, dark lyrical material.
Abstract imagery, great monotone coloring, and artful composition makes this one a winner.
Quasimoto, one of the wackiest and most original hip hop artists to emerge on the West Coast weed music scene, has a simplistic, yet visually rich and abstract album art design. The faceless driver clutching a boom box, while being chased by a police car accompanied by a "Do Not Enter" sign inspires feelings of music rebellion.
Wale, an artist from Washington D.C., has created a perfect parody of the Seinfeld logo for his critically acclaimed mixtape, The Mixtape About Nothing. Hot kicks are Photoshopped in partly to promote the clothing brand which helped to sponser the mixtape. Elaine makes a couple of voice cameos in the mixtape!
Wu-Tang Clan returns to their brooding Staton Island style, laced with obscure Kung-fu movie samples. Their album art similarly follows suit. The rising sun, flanked by the Wu-Tang members, gives the impression that perhaps not all the Wu members are in harmony with each other (there are only six pictured and several do not appear in the album).
Although the album art mentioned above were simply the ones I liked, oftentimes album art sends a strong political, social, or cultural message to the listeners which can be discussed in much greater detail. Alas, that is for another blog post in the future.
Any album art covers strikes you as particularly interesting or inspirational?