Back to blogging: Dissertation Preparation- 2009/2010 Hip Hop Album Covers

Ok so it's been a while since I've used my blog, but with the Dissertation under way and my laziness not helping, I have decided to get some of my research done in blog form.

As my dissertation is about the future of the album cover, I decided to look at all of my CD's that are from 2009 to 2010, as it is only really now that people are questioning the future of the CD with MP3 downloads becoming the main format for music purchases.

So the CD's I looked at are:

Linkin Park: A Thousand Suns

Cypress Hill: Rise Up

Motion City Soundtrack: My Dinosaur Life

Deftones: Diamond Eyes

KRS ONE & Buckshot: Survival Skills

Blakroc ( a hip hop side project produced by The Black Keys and feat. various Rappers)

People Under The Stairs: Carried Away

Eminem: Relapse

Jay-Z: The Blueprint 3

P.O.S: Never Better

The Prodigy: Invaders Must Die

Mos Def: The Ecstatic

Alexisonfire: Old Crows/Young Cardinals

Rise Against: Appeal To Reason

14 CD's - 8 Hip Hop and 6 Rock (ok the prodigy are dance/electronic but they fit in with rock too and for the purposes of cover analysis they fit Rock) all recent and all have a lot of effort put into the cover, the presentation and in most cases the booklet and the case too.

I started off by grouping the CD's by genre and made some interesting discoveries. With the Hip Hop CD's, the first 4 I put down all have red as the main colour! The Cypress Hill and Jay-Z albums do not have the artist on the cover (a first for Jay-Z) and both use similar serif fonts for the artist logo. The only real differences are the way the Cypress Hill's logo, album name and image are merged together, whereas Jay-Z's musical sculpture is the image and his name and album name are very small and in the corners.

Mos Def and Eminem appear on their covers but in very different ways. A close up of Eminem's face is used on Relapse and is an illustration formed within spilt tablets, while Mos Def is shown on his cover jumping and his face is hidden behind his arm. Both albums have the artist and album name omitted from the cover, but are see through stickers stuck to the outside of the plastic case.

"Carried Away" by People Under The Stairs has a cardboard case over the actual CD, it is black with the album name in Red (which again fits with the other album covers) and there are holes punched out of the middle that form the number 7 (it's P.U.T.S 7th album) and there are various pale colours underneath each hole which is just the actual front cover poking through, a photograph of both group members after a crazy party. The design is pretty clever as the black case gives it a very minimalist look, but the CD case taken out has a very different look altogether.

Next is "Survival Skills" by KRS ONE & Buckshot, completely different in colour, and features both rappers scaling a mountain in the rain, which is a bit of a tongue in cheek image as the album is about surviving the rap game, not the wilderness. But seeing it next to Mos Def's album I realised they both use the exact same font!!! The style of the images are fairly similar too but both work really well.

BlakRoc is very different in terms of cover and also content. The album is a side project by rock band The Black Keys where they have played all the tracks and they have different rappers and singers appear on each track (Mos Def is one of them) so each song has a similar musical style but the vocals and lyrics differ from track to track. The cover and font are reminiscent of 1970's rock band covers (Led Zeppelin comes to mind) but the use of colour and layout help it really stand out and despite it being based on older styled art, is a fresh look for 2010 Hip Hop. The case is also a fold out cardboard case.

The last album is P.O.S "Never Better" and the use of an illustration of the artists face gives it a similar look to Eminem "Relapse", although the extra image of the skulls on top make it a much darker and more powerful image. The booklet opens up into 16 images and has 5 acetate images which fit over some of the squares (one of these is the skulls which over lay the front cover image. This really amazed me when I first saw it because it shows how much work has gone into the artwork and it is something you can't experience from an MP3 download. The case is also interesting as it is made from acetate rather than using the standard jewel case.

So eight different current Hip Hop albums with a lot of energy and emphasis on the album artwork even though the CD is something a lot of people have given up on. The artists all vary in terms of popularity and budget, Jay-Z and Eminem appealing to a much broader audience, also having a much larger budget for the artwork. Cypress Hill have been around for almost 20 years and have a large audience of hip hop and rock fans but are no where near as mainstream as Jay Z or Eminem, so they probably still have a large budget, as does KRS ONE who has been around for almost 25 years. People under the stairs and P.O.S are no where near as big but still have the budget to put some brilliant album design together, and Mos Def is somewhere in the middle of being popular and underground.