Wow. That really takes me back to the days of Napster and Live Journal.
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The Internet Never Forgets
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And it never forgives
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In this case, that might be an act of moral clarity.
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OMG yes. That last one gave me a cramp, I laughed so hard…
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“Scumbag Steve” has actually tried to parlay his internet fame into a real rap career.
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Wow. I think I’d call that dance style, “Gimme back my juice box”.
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So can you guys tell me why every god damn rap album in the 2000s had the exact same look, basically?
Like this?
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Back in the 90s, there was a design firm in Houston called Pen & Pixel that was doing a lot of work for local music groups, mostly hip-hop. In the mid-90s they became the in-house design group for No Limit Records, and then Cash Money Records, pumping out their “house style” of these ultra-photoshopped over-the-top bling-lettered covers. And because No Limit & Cash Money artists were very popular, everyone in the late 90s and early 2000s was copying the same look.
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Hm… counterpoint?
OutKast:
Killer Mike:
Goodie Mob:
Cee-Lo
Gnarls Barkley
And of course, Run the Jewels:
Dungeon Family, FTW!
[ETA] Janelle Monae!
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Actually, yes. The same design studio did literally thousands of rap album covers.
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Linked from the article @ficuswhisperer posted is this interview with the former head of Pen & Pixel, talking about what it was like working with thousands of hip hop clients. Their prices ranged from $300-$3000+ for a single cover (a lot more than I’ve ever gotten). Their business pretty much shut down after 9/11; the majority of their clients would fly into Houston and pay them in huge sums of cash, and when the TSA came in, they didn’t want to do that anymore.
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Ok, not “every god damn rap album”, but Jesus Christ did so many of them use that formula at one point.
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Aren’t several of those albums after the mid-late 2000s? They eventually moved on.
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All of the ones you listed that I am familiar with I see as more top tier, originator artists. Not the 1001 clones and "me too"s that rap and hip hop seem to spawn more than most other genres.
I will try to read it later. I figured it was something like that, or just everyone going, “Make it look like those guys.” Which I sort of understand, but I think after the first couple dozen if I was an artist I wouldn’t want to make my album look like 1001 other artists. But then again, WTF do I know. The most I have done is one really bad techno song with fruity loops and I don’t even have a surviving “good” copy with the beats in all the right places…
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It’s a video without a transcript actually. The gist of it is that they basically had what they call a “Chinese menu” approach, where you could ‘order’ your album cover at different levels of customization and complexity, checking off the elements you want. The place was an album cover factory. Most of their clients went for a mid-tier ‘template’, so they’d throw some stock images behind a photo of the artist, put their name in a ‘bling bling’ font, and call it a day. They would charge on the basis of how many layers the Photoshop file had. In the course of 9 years they did about 11,000 album covers.
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This style of cover art is really easy to make, but not all rappers from that era used the same style of art. Most underground crews from the Northeast (Boston, NYC, Philly, Ohio, etc.) avoided this style of cover completely.
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I’d suspect you’d find something similar in any genre of music. How many later industrial bands ripped off the artistic style for artwork from earlier bands.
Again… every genre of music works this way. And at some point, Killer Mike and OutKast were just struggling artists.
Style-wise, it’s easy because there’s not much creativity involved, but I hated it when rap artists requested a bling-bling style cover like the Pen & Pixel stuff… all of the 3D lettering with diamonds inside, the Photoshop work involved in layering everything together without it looking cheap & crappy… extremely time consuming stuff. Happily they’d mostly gone out of style by the time I started doing cover art.
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Well, on the other hand, that is an impressive number.
I was just thinking of how many metal LPs from the late 80’s had the same look, and realized it’s because a lot of them were done by this guy:
https://www.discogs.com/artist/1888983-Edward-J-Repka
He’s like the Roger Dean of metal.
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True, there are similar styles in genres, and certain bands are even known for having album covers that use the same artist or the same theme like Iron Maiden, Anthrax, and KMFDM.
But similarity in the genre, and continuity of an artist is different than the nearly identical style and layout of those sample covers.
But nungesser and others explained it well, they were all being made by the same people in a production-like environment, from a cookie-cutter menu. So my thirst for knowledge has been satiated.
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