One Direction Over Again Album Cover

Rap is rooted in the Due east Declension, just the West Declension was instrumental in elevating the visual presentation of the fine art form. Rappers from Los Angeles cultivated atypical styles that became indivisible from the music. You can point to N.Due west.A.'due south all-black aesthetic, the billowy and gleaming candy-painted Chevrolet Impalas that jumped to g-funk, or the enduring L.A. uniform of khaki'south, Antipodal, and a fresh white t-shirt. That style carried over to their album covers. The best reflected their creators' musical, personal, and cultural influences. Today, many of those are synonymous with the sound of Westward Declension rap, the music aural at showtime sight.

Here are the stories backside ten of the greatest West Coast rap album covers, listed chronologically by release appointment.

N.West.A. – Straight Outta Compton

(1988, photography by Eric Poppleton, art direction by Kevin Hosmann)

N.Due west.A. didn't create gangsta rap, but they codification the subgenre's invincible, irreverent, and militant gangsta mythos on 1988's Straight Outta Compton . Dr. Dre and DJ Yella crafted a avalanche of banging yet funky beats that hitting harder than LAPD battering rams. Backed by that production, Ice Cube and MC Ren captured the anger Blackness men in Compton and elsewhere felt from enduring police brutality in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods that were already veritable war zones. Meanwhile, Eazy-E played the swaggering, malt liquor-swilling dopeman. The Straight Outta Compton embrace photo of the group, taken from the perspective of a potential murder victim, mirrored the album's every audio, sentiment, and gunshot.

Fresh from California Establish of the Arts, photographer Eric Poppleton got the North.W.A. gig via friend and art manager Kevin Hosmann. Lacking funds for locations or lighting, Poppleton and Hosmann improvised for the cover shoot. "There was no artificial lighting or anything, I just lay on the ground and they pointed what hopefully was an unloaded gun down at the camera," Poppleton told NME of the Straight Outta Compton cover photo. "I couldn't say for sure whether it was ready to fire, but it was definitely a existent gun."

Listen to the anthology here.

Water ice Cube – Death Document

(1991, photography by Mario Castellanos, art direction by Kevin Hosmann)

When Ice Cube arrived with N.W.A., he held nothing sacred and had no idols. That mentality became fifty-fifty more credible in his solo work. Anybody was a target for his ire and interrogation on his sophomore album, Death Document . Police, politicians, the president, white people, women – the list goes on. The album was as personal as it was sociopolitical, conscious yet total of contradictions that the printing picked autonomously. On the cover, Ice Cube stands inside a morgue, pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag while Uncle Sam lies dead beneath it. The prototype displayed Cube'due south unrelenting indictment of the U.South. and his belief that Black men could rise above the land's past atrocities and present injustices.

Mind to the album here.

The Pharcyde – Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

(1992, artwork by Slick)

The Pharcyde were the antithesis of the posturing, ostensibly invincible gangster macks who dominated L.A. rap in the 90s. Instead, the grouping of dancers turned rappers offered self-deprecating comedy, stoner hijinx, emotional vulnerability, and youthful lust, couching everything in jazzy yet bumping beats. The cover for the group's Delicious Vinyl debut, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde , is as colorful and libidinous as songs like "On the DL" and "Otha Fish."

Designed by graffiti artist, fine arts graduate, and eventual street clothing designer Slick (Richard Wyrgatsch II), the Fat Albert-esque cartoon on the Bizarre Ride comprehend depicts the group riding in a cart on a winding and dilapidated rollercoaster straight into the rima oris of a woman. The rollercoaster was partly inspired by the Colossus coaster Magic Mount in Valencia, CA, and the woman was modeled on adult movie star Ebony Ayes. Talking to KCET about the sexual comprehend art, Slick said, "…[W]due east already established how nosotros were going to crop it in, and how it'd be real a real subtle affair. I like the fact that it was a slow read. Information technology wasn't as well blatant, y'all know."

Listen to the album here.

Dr. Dre – The Chronic

(1992, art direction/blueprint by Kimberly Holt, photography by Daniel Jordon)

Dr. Dre fabricated a hard pivot after leaving N.W.A. The producer/rapper who claimed he didn't "fume weed or sess" on "Express Yourself" became an avowed smoker when he recorded his aptly named solo debut, 1992'southward The Chronic , for the and then newly formed Death Row Records. A diss record that eviscerated Eazy-Eastward, a sociopolitical treatise on all the injustices that inspired the 1992 L.A. riots – the album was all that and more while turning g-funk into a cinematic sonic experience meant to soundtrack cruising, gang activity, and fume sessions. The cover of The Chronic points to the latter. Inspired by the logo for Zig-Zag, the French-originated rolling papers, Dre's mean-mugging photo supplants the illustration of the French soldier that appears on Zig-Zag packaging. Simple even so effective and now forever iconic, the comprehend was gangster yet inviting, but similar g-funk.

Listen to the album here.

Cypress Loma – Black Sunday

(1993, photography by Anthony Artiaga; concept and design by Dante Ariola)

Cypress Hill were cholo stoners obsessed with hydroponic strains and doom in equal mensurate, rap'due south reply to Cheech and Chong and Black Sabbath. B-Real and Sen Dog painted their section of S Gate, California, in vivid, DayGlo hues while cloaking information technology in darkness and clouds of blunt smoke. The grouping'south logo – a skull vivisected by several arrows – presaged the epitome they'd utilize on their sophomore album, Black Sunday.

DJ Muggs, the producer who scored many of the grouping'due south other albums, came up with the concept for Blackness Sunday's eerie, Sabbath-esque artwork of a lone tree atop a hill littered with headstones while driving by a Brooklyn cemetery. "I'm driving by this cemetery every day into the metropolis, and 1 solar day it f***ing snows and all the leaves are off all the trees," Muggs told the NY Post . "There are simply icicles on all the trees. The whole affair is white with snow, and I was like, 'Yep, I want to shoot that f***rex album cover in that cemetery.'"

Snoop Dogg – Doggystyle

(1993, illustration by Joe Cool)

Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg fabricated no secret of their affinity for George Clinton and the music of Parliament and Funkadelic. And then information technology was no surprise that the drawing cover art of Snoop Dogg'southward 1993 debut anthology, Doggystyle, is partly an homage to the comic illustrations on albums similar Funkadelic's I Nation Under a Groove. On the brilliant and busy cover, a half-human, half-dog wearing a hat, a long flannel, and a gold chain – a prototypical L.A. outfit in the 90s – leans over the edge of a dog house to reach for the tail of a half-woman, half-dog wearing lingerie. Behind them, a dogcatcher waits to capture them. Similar a g-funk answer to the chorus in a Greek tragedy, three dogs sit atop a brick wall observing the proceedings and quoting Clinton'southward "Atomic Dog."

Snoop Dogg's cousin, Joe Cool, illustrated the comprehend. Absurd sent Snoop a portrait of him during a prison stint, and Snoop came to Cool with Dr. Dre's concept after he was released. "He said, 'Well Dr. Dre really wants a picture of me on top of a doghouse, reaching over, feeling on a domestic dog's ass or something. But I want you to draw it, though. We'll run information technology by Dre,'" Cool told HipHopDX . Dr. Dre approved, and the remainder is rap history.

2Pac – All Eyez on Me

(1996, photography by Ken Nahoum)

All Eyez on Me is arguably 2Pac'due south most well-known and enduring album. The reasons for this are many. You tin point to the context of its cosmos, the size of Pac's celebrity, the strength of the music, the visual presentation, his tragic demise shortly after its release, or all of the above. The 27-track, double album is total of anger, paranoia, lust, superstar swagger, thug defiance, and glasses of thug passion. You can read it all on the cover.

Shot by Expiry Row'due south then in-house photographer Ken Nahoum, the photo captures Pac at the peak of his fame and one of the darkest of times in his life. It perfectly captures the Thug Life and Mad Max aesthetic that would inform the "California Dearest" video. Shirtless, Pac shows off his tattoos, flashes a Death Row medallion hanging from a aureate concatenation, and rocks the black leather strap of a Jean Paul Gaultier vest. Throwing up the West Coast "W," he visually cues where his allegiances prevarication in the notorious East Declension/West Declension beef. Pac's optics besides convey the sensitivity that immune him to make songs like "Dear Mama" from Me Against the Globe, the album that preceded All Eyez on Me. "Tupac was a poet," Nahoum told Andscape . "He was a person with a great vision in life." While 2Pac is no longer with us, his vision continues to inspire people from every walk of life.

Mind to the album here.

The Game – The Documentary

(2005, photography by Jonathan Mannion)

With The Documentary, The Game made a W Coast rap album that almost seemed like it was created in a lab, a combination of every sound, sight, and cultural touchstone that defined L.A. rap. He continually called back to his predecessors, and – at the same time – added personal and modern touches to the audio and tropes of the past.

The album encompass was shot by renowned hip-hop photographer Jonathan Mannion, who'd taken iconic cover photos for Jay-Z, Eminem, DMX, and more. Like 2Pac earlier him, The Game poses shirtless. He wears blackness Dickies and black Converse, both staples in 50.A. street fashion. To nod to West Coast car culture, he sits atop a tire with gilt wire rims, the preferred rims for the lowriders that became synonymous with g-funk. "This is arguably 1 of the most important pictures in hip-hop," Mannion said in a conversation with The Game. He'south not wrong. The Documentary embrace is a minimalist encapsulation of everything that makes Due west Declension hip-hop.

Listen to the anthology here.

Jurassic 5 – Quality Control

(2000, photography past Brian Cross a.g.a. B+)

While gangster rap ruled Los Angeles airwaves in the 90s, avant-garde underground rappers sparred at heated open up mics and parking lot ciphers, developing inventive cadences and occasionally landing major label deals. Jurassic 5 ranks among the all-time of the bunch. Four rappers (Chali 2na, Soup, Akil, and Marc 7) and ii producer-DJs (Cut Pharmacist, Nu-Mark) who hopped in a time motorcar and signed to Interscope, the group reinvented and updated the collaborative party-rocking routines of predecessors like the Cold Crush Brothers. Conscious, reverent, and uplifting without being corny, Jurassic 5 moved crowds while dispelling L.A. and entertainment industry myths on albums similar Quality Control.

Inspired by the album cover for Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood, Nu-Mark envisioned the cover as a "closeup of a needle on a tape stump." In the end, the Quality Control comprehend photo showed the group sitting in the middle of a Los Angeles intersection as cars speed past while listening to a tree stump with their "J5" logo carved into it. The image encapsulated the group's "back to the roots" ethos and ability to articulate everything they saw in L.A. According to photographer B+, Nu-Mark was upset about the visibility of the record histrion tonearm atop the stump. "Information technology'due south a complicated thing to be able to practice a pretty large group photograph and pull a detail that ostensibly lives in a square inch of the photograph. It was crazy," B+ told SPIN. "Keith Tamashiro was the designer and was very much an integral function. In the terminate, he was the one that helped me to understand Nu-Mark."

Listen to the album here.

Kendrick Lamar – good child, m.A.A.d city

(2012, art management by Kendrick Lamar)

Kendrick Lamar's sophomore anthology proficient kid, yard.A.A.d city is an intense, deeply personal bildungsroman. A loftier-speed ride in a bucket minivan down Rosecrans Ave., decades in Compton seen through the eyes of a sensitive, poetic, insightful, and conflicted soul. There'due south youthful lust, chest-beating car freestyles ("Backseat Freestyles"), anti-drinking anthems ("Swimming Pools (Drank)"), unrelenting demons from retentivity lane ("thousand.A.A.d city"), and more. Talking to FUSE , Lamar called the anthology a "self-portrait."

Fittingly, the album encompass features him as a child, a snapshot of the world that shaped him. Lamar explained its significance all-time. "Two of my uncles, that'south two of them, to the far right, that's my gramps and a babe canteen next to a 40-ounce side by side to a gang sign, holding a child," Lamar told FUSE. "Information technology's not just music to me. This is a story about the youth and the people that they call delinquents in my metropolis. You await in the background and you meet a flick on the wall of me and my pops. The eyes blanked out, that'south for my ain personal reasons. You'll probably hear nearly that in the anthology, but that photo simply says so much about my life and how I was raised in Compton and the things I've seen through innocent eyes. You don't run across no one else's eyes, merely you lot come across my eyes of innocence and trying to figure out what's going on."

Listen to the anthology here.

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Source: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-west-coast-rap-hip-hop-album-covers/

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