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With his debut mixtape, ‘Lil Boat,’ Lil Yachty fully shed the mumble rap label, transitioning from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

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Lil Yachty’s debut mixtape, Lil Boat , is one of the pre-eminent releases of the SoundCloud era. Released on March 9, 2016, it made Lil Yachty a star, spawned multiple hits, and further legitimized the DIY-style rap that emerged at the beginning of the decade.

The Atlanta MC entered the crowded rapper-singer fray with a work that’s split into two distinct sides, seeing him grapple with dueling elements of his personality and career. The first half of Lil Boat sees Yachty flex his flow, while the second half finds him crooning in AutoTune. That may be a slightly reductive way to look at the collection (in reality, he does both throughout), but there’s certainly a kind of TI vs TIP split-personality concept to the whole affair. Yachty uses his style to demarcate who is who, and, despite his glee throughout, Lil Boat is a surprisingly subtle work for the chaotic time it represents.

Listen to the best of Lil Yachty on Apple Music and Spotify.

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A standout work.

Yachty’s debut mixtape is a standout work for the usual reasons – great name, great cover, and two singles that will forever be associated with Yachty and the era from which he emerged: “One Night” and “Minnesota.”

As a title, Lil Boat was perfect. Serving two purposes at once, it created a fitting alt.moniker for the MC while helping a lot of people to pronounce his name (did you actually say it like “yacht”?). Nautical luxury isn’t the most commonly-evoked lifestyle in hip-hop (outside of Puffy), so that theme alone was enough to put Yachty in his own lane. And then there’s the artwork: not a yacht, barely even a boat; it’s basically a little wooden dinghy. Beautifully composed, the image looks like a classical painting, bordered in a red that matches Yachty’s hair. It’s almost Americana in tone – though Yachty’s music is anything but.

All hail “King Of The Youth”

Yachty may be poised and confident on that cover, but he’s also lost in the gloom at sea – an apt metaphor for the musical style he was leading. While not traditional in any sense, Yachty is honest with his emotions in a way that younger generations have always been, and Lil Boat found him attempting to navigate his way through the emotionally turbulent years of his late youth. Shortly after his breakout, Yachty would declare himself “King Of Teens” or, alternatively, “King Of The Youth.” This might have sounded ridiculous to adults who weren’t even sure how to pronounce his name, but those adults were no longer in charge. Lil Yachty was not part of some hip-hop assembly line; like other DIY pioneers before him, Yachty and his crew were making these songs at home, often in a matter of minutes.

Outside of the Vikings football team and Ice Cube ’s “What Can I Do?,” Minnesota doesn’t get name-checked very often in hip-hop. Simply naming a track after a state was seemingly in line with the aforementioned “half-Americana, half trolling” theme of Lil Boat – but, of course, the song isn’t actually about Minnesota. It’s more of a celebration of Lil Yachty’s arrival on the scene. The draw and significance of having both Quavo and Young Thug on a song in 2016 is hard to overstate, and their guest appearances turned “Minnesota” into a certified-gold hit. At the time, Quavo was just months away from releasing “Bad And Boujee,” while Thug was fresh off Barter 6 and in the middle of his Slime Season run. Together, he and Yachty appeared at Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show, on February 11, where The Life Of Pablo received its public unveiling. Just two days after releasing his debut mixtape, Yachty was at the epicenter of one of hip-hop’s biggest cultural shifts.

Unprecedented moves

Lil Boat was big enough that Burberry Perry – Yachty’s right-hand man at the time and the producer behind most of the mixtape – came under pressure from the fashion label Burberry and was forced to change his name. That wasn’t exactly an unprecedented move, but the speed with which it happened certainly was. It’s not often that an internationally renowned fashion house serves a cease-and-desist to a kid who got famous on the internet and was barely old enough to vote.

Perry’s production on Lil Boat ’s lead single, “One Night’ (Yachty’s best-known song to date), guided the way for the rest of the collection. Even the beats he didn’t produce fall right in line, all cascading bells, and whistles alongside keys that let you hear Yachty’s grin throughout.

Lil Yachty’s emergence closely resembles that of the Odd Future collective, who, years earlier, more or less launched DIY rap on the internet (depending on how you view Lil B’s rise to fame). Seemingly overnight, Yachty was partnering with Urban Outfitters and the aptly titled Nautica clothing brand. His rapid ascent would have sounded like fan fiction just a few years earlier but, after his breakout, many artists began following his path to fame on a regular basis.

Having hit it big in such a short space of time, Yachty wasn’t about to slow down. He went on to guest (and absolutely steal the show) on “Broccoli,” a DRAM song with a Yachty-perfect beat. As one of the stars in Quality Control ’s shining roster, Yachty was operating alongside some of the biggest acts in hip-hop. With Lil Boat, he fully shed the “mumble rap” label, completing the transition from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

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Why Lil Yachty Says It’s Time to ‘Wake Everybody Up’

After laying relatively low in 2019, the Sailing Team's captain returns with a massive chip on his shoulder to put a bow on his momentous Lil Boat series.

By Michael Saponara

Michael Saponara

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Lil Yachty is coming for his respect. After not releasing any projects and remaining relatively quiet in 2019, the Sailing Team’s captain returned in May with a massive chip on his shoulder, to put a bow on his momentous Lil Boat series with the third and final chapter.

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The series is something the 23-year-old holds near and dear to his heart, as it served as his introduction to rap’s mainstream and put him on the map just a year after graduating high school. With the stakes raised at a pivotal point in his career, Yachty went back to the drawing board five times wiping the slate clean until he found the desired patina for LB3 to take shape.

On the set, Boat blends melodic bubblegum trap that sounds as if there’s something lodged in his throat and the loopy rhymes of vintage Yachty, alongside a myriad of special guests to execute the project’s vision. The rapper also notches three co-production credits on the album as well.

Yachty has remained low-key inside his ATL mansion for much of the quarantine. He’s dabbled in his fair share of playing video games, recording new music, continuing his kids’ menu diet of waffles, pizza, and chicken nuggets — which he combats with some yoga and hitting the gym to balance “eating like an eight-year-old and trying to be healthy at the same time.”

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Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police on Memorial Day, the ensuing protests setting the city ablaze saw Yachty’s infectious “Minnesota” hook take on a new meaning. “You need to stay up out them streets if you can’t take the heat,” he raps on the icy 2015 track.

After collecting his thoughts for a couple of days and even debating making the trip to Minneapolis himself on LB3 release day, Yachty took action by donating $3,000 to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, and joined protestors (May 30) on the frontlines walking the streets of Downtown ATL. Yachty showed maturity and leadership beyond his years when getting on the megaphone to  deliver a powerful speech. “We gotta stand for something or fall for anything,” he proclaimed.

Dive into our interview with Yachty below, as he debates an artist’s responsibility to comment on social issues, always hearing the haters no matter what he does, how Drake ended up on “Oprah’s Bank Account,” and more.

Billboard: Wrapping up with Lil Boat 3 , what does the series mean to you?

Lil Yachty: It’s just where I started my music career. It will always have a special place in my heart. It’s what brought me into music. It will always be a very important project — both the first and the last one. I think they play a pivotal role, with the first one being my introduction and this third one being a stamp to remind people that I really do this s–t.

Your last album was Nuthin 2 Prove , but now it’s “ComebackSZN Boat” time with your Twitter name. Do you feel like you’ve got a chip on your shoulder with this project that you’re still right here?

[A] big chip. I feel like I took a long break and it’s time to wake everybody up.

You kicked off LB3′ s rollout with “Oprah’s Bank Account.” What did you think of the fans’ reception to it?

I think it was a good reception, but at the same time, a lot of people were upset — black people specifically — with the whole man in a dress thing, but it wasn’t that deep.

How did you get Drake on there? Did you guys talk about how that song ended up being the one that Drizzy broke the record with for most Hot 100 placements?

Drake actually asked me to be on there. I met Baby when he was doing a meet-n-greet and I hung out with him. [Drake] thanked me for it. I told him, “No need to thank me, sir. You did all the work.”

How did you end up linking with Tyler, Rocky, and Tierra Whack on “T.D.” and why did you sample that Tokyo Drift song?

Originally, that song was supposed to be me, Rocky, and [A$AP] Ferg. I guess Rocky played his verse for Tyler and then Tyler was like, “Oh, I’m getting on this.” Then I was like, “I know somebody that would kill everybody [on this].” So I reached out to Tierra Whack because she’s a really good friend of mine, and I really wanted her to have that look. I knew she was going to go crazy, which she did. I just love that song by the Teriyaki Boyz.

What was your role in the co-production of the three tracks you produced on the album?

I picked the sample for “Tokyo Drift.” For “Can’t Go,” I made the melody. For “Wock in Stock,” I did the 808s. It’s a difficult process.

Talk to me about “Till the Morning” with Durk and Thugger.

We’ve been sitting on that record for a very long time. I want to say it dates back to at least 2018. We just wanted to see who was going to drop it first. Yeah, we had all did it together. Durk is that n—a. He’s dumb-chill and humble.

The Boat Show has let fans into your life during quarantine. We see you eating waffles, pizza, chicken nuggets, hitting the gym, and doing some yoga.

I don’t know, I guess that’s a twist between eating like an eight-year-old and trying to be healthy at the same time.

I’ve been on the Mountain Dew Baja Blast wave. Are you a Baja Blast guy?

I f–k with the Baja Blast heavy. I like to go to Taco Bell and get it. It’s crazy, I’m a snack connoisseur.

Have you been playing a lot of Warzone as well?

I just got my first win with Tee Grizzley like two days ago. That game, I love it, but the Warzone ain’t easy. I’m a beast online — like Team Deathmatch. You got to move different on Search and Destroy.

I enjoyed your “Can You Stand The Rain” New Edition cover, but some people were hating on it.

People hate on me regardless, bro. It’s just a given. I’ll never be the most likable artist. I did that in 2017, bro. One night, it was like five in the morning, I was on IG Live with fans and I dropped it.

You still gotta keep the confidence up, though.

Oh, I’m that n—a.

How are you still keeping up with the shopping?

Bro, I shop every single day.

Are the stores coming to your place?

That and I do a lot of Grailed and eBay shopping. I had to change my username because it was too obvious at first. I’m on my ’85 collection right now. I’m trying to collect all of the 1985 Jordan’s. I got about eight right now, it’s just so expensive.

With the riots going on across the country in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, do you feel artists have a responsibility to speak out?

I feel like this is a tricky conversation. Some people generally don’t want to say something that would upset people, while other people are just minding their own business. It should resonate more if you’re a black man. It’s just difficult.

I’m not fuckin with what’s goin on in Minnesota, thinking bout flyin out there and walkin the streets with the people… what celebrity will meet me there? Dead ass — CONCRETE BOY BOAT^ (@lilyachty) May 29, 2020

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Lil Yachty , 88GLAM

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Miles Parks McCollum (born August 23, 1997), known professionally as Lil Yachty, is an American rapper, singer and songwriter. Yachty first gained recognition in August 2015 for his singles "One Night" and "Minnesota" from his debut EP Summer Songs. He released his debut mixtape Lil Boat in March 2016. On June 10, 2016, Yachty announced that he had signed a joint venture record deal with Quality Control Music, Capitol Records, and Motown Records. His mixtapes Lil Boat and Summer Songs 2 were released in 2016 and his debut studio album, Teenage Emotions in 2017. His second studio album, Lil Boat 2 was released on March 9, 2018. more »

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With its "once upon a time"-style introduction, Lil Yachty's debut commercial project starts off sounding a little like a children's book. When you read out his name with the mixtape's title—Lil Yachty's Lil Boat—it sounds like a nursery rhyme. It's an aesthetic symmetry that evokes youthful whimsy, which matches the rapper's slurred, lullaby melodies and the gleaming beats he splashes with playboy flexes and tales of aspiration. This is the stylistic mix at the heart of "bubblegum trap," a sound pioneered by Yachty himself. While he later dismissed the label, it remains an apt description for the mellifluous sing-song raps and lackadaisical flows that permeate the star-making project. Checking in at 40 minutes, the mixtape introduces fans to two central characters: Lil Boat and Lil Yachty. Boat is his more aggressive alter ego, while Yachty is the friendlier, even more melodically inclined variant. The two identities grow further apart in subsequent projects, but on Lil Boat, they both thrive on warbles you might mumble under your breath. For "Minnesota," Yachty floats over rainbow keys that could come from an ice cream truck, threading flexes with off-kilter warnings about life in the trenches. Verses from Quavo, Skippa Da Flippa, and Young Thug further embed it with a grit that's at odds with the toddler-friendly instrumental, giving it a delectable layer of irony. Yachty surfaces again on "Good Day," with his Auto-Tuned vocals coloring a fly guy's wonderland. Peeking from behind the neon haze, Lil Boat emerges on "Not My Bro," a casual dismissal of would-be hangers-on. Meanwhile, on "Interlude," Boat unloads a barrage of death threats, packaging them in a dazed beat and a murmur that sits opposite Yachty's sugarcoated melodies elsewhere on the project. With Boat fading into a malaise as he cruises above the opiate synths, it feels like a foggy daydream. If this were an imaginary world, "One Night" would be its first monument. After going viral in a comedic video, the track picked up millions of streams, propelling Yachty from ambitious college dropout to ubiquitous internet presence. Fusing muted synths with a drowsy melody, the track was a player's anthem for the new school—and the beginning of Yachty’s extremely online Gen Z fairy tale.

March 9, 2016 13 Songs, 40 minutes ℗ 2016 Quality Control Music, Capitol Records and Motown Records

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How to Tell the Difference Between Lil Yachty and Lil Boat

Atlanta-based mumble rapper Lil Yachty released his debut studio album,  “Teenage Emotions,” on May 26 and reintroduced us to his alter egos: Darnell Boat and Lil Boat.

Much like in Lil Yachty’s 2016 mixtape release, “Lil Boat,”  the red-mustachioed and wigged Darnell Boat introduces listeners to his nephews, Lil Yachty and Lil Boat, in the intro of the album. “Yachty and Boat have been working so hard over this past year, and we just want to welcome y’all to ‘Teenage Emotions,’” says Darnell Boat in the first song of the album, “Like A Star.” “They both have lots to say…this time I think Yachty wants to go first.” After, Uncle Darnell effectively leads fans into a concept album that displays the two distinct rap personas of Lil Yachty.

It can be difficult to differentiate between both Lil Boat and Lil Yachty as a first time listener. There are, however, a number of distinguishing traits displayed in both of their approaches to music and lyrics that can help successfully identify who’s who.

Music Style

In an interview with Genius , Lil Yachty said that the defining characteristic of Lil Boat is aggressiveness.” That word sums it all up, as Boat is the more masculine, foul-mouthed, confident rapper of the two. Boat seems to come out and say the things that Yachty feels he couldn’t get away with, while laying down dark and dirty verses to Atlanta-style trap beats in tracks like “DN Freestyle” and “Dirty Mouth.” “It’s all in production,” says Yachty in the interview. “If the beat is like, heavy hitting, that’s Boat.”

Yachty prefers the lighter tones of music, the kind of sound that he’s dubbed as “boat music” in the past. Tracks on the album such as “Better,” which features steel drums reminiscent of Jamaican island music, as well as the heavy-synth eighties-style track, “Bring It Back,” with a sprinkle of a saxophone solo, are all Yachty creations. He tends to lean toward high-pitched, heavily auto-tuned singing, as opposed to forced attempts at mumble rapping like Boat. Positivity and good vibes are common themes in Yachty’s lyrics.

In his bars, Lil Boat is, without a doubt, the typical misogynistic rap star that displays women as sexual objects. Constantly referring to women as “b*tches,” Boat likes to brag about having multiple women that only serve the sexual needs of him and his friends. Boat is only interested in what women can give him, and in songs like “Peek A Boo,” he shows just how little he cares about having meaningful relationships with them with lines like, “F*ck her then f*ck on her sister, I’m ruthless.”

“It’s not Yachty man,” says Yachty in response to that lyric in a separate interview with Genius . “In interviews, that’s Yachty. But that on that paper, that’s Lil Boat. He’s a ruthless dude. He don’t care. Yachty is a nice dude. That’s not him. At all. That n***a Boat, he crazy, know what I’m saying? You never know what he might do.”

Romantic, monogamous, vulnerable and semi-respectful, Yachty has a different approach to love. In tracks like “Forever Young” and “Lady In Yellow,” he sings about wanting to be together forever with his only girl. Showing more awareness of a woman’s agency over her body, Yachty is more concerned with pleasing women and doing what they want.

Though put rather ineloquently, lines like “Baby can I f*ck with you?” and “Let me love on you” are examples of Yachty showing a slight concern for consent. This is in sharp contrast with Boat’s lyrics calling for multiple women to perform oral sex on him, or “Blow like a cello,” which is probably the greatest lyrical oversight in history.

In short, if someone on Tinder were to find Twizzler-hair and multicolored mouth grills attractive, then they should swipe left on Boat and swipe right on Yachty.

It’s not hard to figure out how Boat feels about fame, as Boat is an acronym for “Best of All Time,” according to a tweet from Lil Yachty’s official account. Self-assured and confident, he’s been presenting himself as the self-proclaimed “King of the Teens” since his beginnings. Riding the fame and all that comes with it, Boat likes to rap about the money, cars and diamonds that he didn’t have just a few short years ago.

In contrast, Yachty is unsure of his standing as a public figure. In “Say My Name,” Yachty redundantly sings, “I want you to say my name, say my name, say my, say my name in the crowd,” hinting at his concern for how he is received by his audience, and the popularity he amasses from his fans. Yachty claims to be a normal teenager, (as normal as a six-figure teen can be), and with the emotional years of adolescence comes an inevitable uncertainty of his place in the world.

On Family and Peers

“I didn’t ask for respect, all I care about is that check,” raps Boat on “Dirty Mouth.” Boat doesn’t care about what people think, and he definitely doesn’t care about what the haters are saying about him. He’s just there to do him, and also attempt to emasculate his rivals by acting hard and likening them to female genitalia, like in “FYI (Know Now).”

Yachty is constantly singing about the “ice” on his mother’s wrist, or alluding to the hundred pairs of shoes his sister has in her closet in interviews. He cares about his family and he attributes a lot of his success to his mom. In the intro he sings, “Look mama you made a star,” and the outro, “Momma” is completely dedicated to her, bringing the gratitude full circle.

In his music, Yachty emulates the man that his mom raised him to be, while Boat is the reflection of Yachty as he sees himself fitting into the hip-hop world.

How It Comes Together

Listening to Lil Yachty’s discography is a human behavioral experiment on the effect that constant exposure to something initially unpleasant can have on the subject’s opinion. Someone once likened it to eating vegetables; they taste terrible at first, but become pretty good after recurring exposure. Nothing else captures the initial resistance to Yachty and Boat’s dichotomy and the new sound they create together; in addition to, the acceptance and appreciation by the listener that soon follows.

In its first week, only forty-six thousand copies of “Teenage Emotions” were sold. Lil Yachty’s heavy streaming presence on sites like Soundcloud , where he originally gained his cult following, and apps like Spotify , may have something to do with low sales, but he’s going on tour and working on new music regardless of its success.

Either way, Lil Yachty and his alter egos have undoubtedly made a name for themselves in the genre, whether they’re loved or hated; there are plenty who do both.

Brittany Sodic, University of North Texas

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Brittany sodic, university of north texas journalism - digital & print.

[…] To view the featured image click here To view the above image click here […]

[…] sides of the same coins, alternative personas of the same man. Yachty himself has stated that his alter-ego Boat is “crazy”, a fact we can see in how wildly different and more aggressive the lyricism is […]

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From biggie to beyoncé to bad bunny, from nirvana to nas to neil young, this is the album art that changed the way we see music.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW COOLEY

The album is the best invention of the past century, hands down — but the music isn’t the whole story. The album cover has been a cultural obsession as long as albums have. Ever since 12-inch vinyl records took off in the 1950s, packaged in cardboard sleeves, musicians have been fascinated by the art that goes on those covers, and so have fans. When the Beatles revolutionized the game with the cover of Sgt. Pepper , in 1967, it became a way to make a visual statement about where the music comes from and why it matters. But the art of the album cover just keeps evolving.

So this is our massive celebration of that art: the 100 best album covers ever, from Biggie to Beyoncé to Bad Bunny, from Nirvana to Nas to Neil Young, from SZA to Sabbath to the Sex Pistols. We’ve got rap, country, jazz, prog, metal, reggae, flamenco, funk, goth, hippie psychedelia, hardcore punk. But all these albums have a unique look to go with the sound. The most unforgettable covers become part of the music — how many Pink Floyd fans have gotten their minds blown staring at the prism on the cover of Dark Side of the Moon , after using it to roll up their smoking materials?

What makes an album cover a classic? Sometimes it’s a portrait of the artist — think of the Beatles crossing the street, or Carole King in Laurel Canyon with her cat. Others go for iconic, semi-abstract images, like Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, or My Bloody Valentine. Some artists make a statement about where they’re from, whether it’s R.E.M. repping the South with kudzu or Ol’ Dirty Bastard flashing his food-stamps card to salute the Brooklyn Zoo.

Many of these covers come from legendary photographers, designers, and artists, like Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Storm Thorgerson, Raymond Pettibon, and Peter Saville. Some have cosmic symbolism for fans to decode; others go for star power. But they’re all classic images that have become a crucial part of music history. And they all show why there’s no end to the world’s long-running love affair with albums.

CONTRIBUTORS: David Browne , Jon Dolan , Suzy Exposito , Andy Greene , Kory Grow , Maya Georgi , Maura Johnston , Gabrielle Macafee , Angie Martoccio , Mosi Reeves , Rob Sheffield , Hank Shteamer , Simon Vozick-Levinson , Alison Weinflash , Christopher Weingarten

From Rolling Stone US

Spinal Tap, ‘Smell the Glove’

There was no easy way to discuss “the issue with the cover” of (totally fictitious heavy-metal band) Spinal Tap’s (nonexistent) 1982 album, Smell the Glove, as recounted in a scene from the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap: “You put a greased, naked woman on all fours, with a dog collar around her neck and a leash, and a man’s arm extended out up to here holding onto the leash, and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it,” artist-relations rep Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher) says. “You don’t find that offensive?” Well, somebody did, so Spinal Tap ended up with an all-black cover. The band members equivocated it by saying it looked like black leather, a black mirror, death, and mourning. Then Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) got it: “There’s something about this that’s so black, it’s like, ‘How much more black could this be?’ And the answer is, ‘None. None more black.’” The joke manifested itself in real life with Spinal Tap’s soundtrack album, a punk band called None More Black, and “Black Albums” from Metallica, Jay-Z, Prince, the Damned, and many others. Plus, Spinal Tap eventually released their original album cover, albeit toned down a little, years later on the sleeve of their single “Bitch School.” —K.G.

Grateful Dead, ‘Europe 72’

Together or separately, the San Francisco artists Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse made sure that album art for the Grateful Dead was as trippy (1971’s Grateful Dead) or earthy (Workingman’s Dead) as the music inside. Their visuals for the band’s live triple album are among the simplest in Dead album history. The big, clumsy foot about to stomp on Europe is a witty metaphor for the Dead’s wild-eyed series of shows on that continent, and the “fool” smashing an ice-cream cone into his forehead on the back cover is just goofy Dead fun. (It may also be connected to a tale in drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir about the band dumping some ice cream onto an annoying fan.) Even in the land of the Dead, where visual and musical indulgence could rule, Kelley and Mouse realized that sometimes, less is more. —D.B.

Lil Yachty, ‘Lil Boat’

The cover of Lil Yachty’s debut mixtape, Lil Boat, finds the rapper clad in overalls, standing in a small boat in the middle of the ocean. The collage is framed by a red border printed with the numbers 33.7750° N 84.3900° W — coordinates for the Five Points neighborhood in downtown Atlanta — marking the then-18-year-old rap vocalist as the latest manifestation of the city’s fast-moving and highly influential scene. Mihailo Andic, who designed Lil Boat using a photograph provided by Yachty’s management, drew inspiration from Tumblr. “I thought it’d be a great idea to pitch a cover to his management team: Yachty, on a boat, in the middle of nowhere,” he told Green Label in 2016. “My whole style uses retouching and superimposing photos to make them look as one.” —M.R.

Public Image Ltd, ‘Metal Box’

“We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out,” Public Image Ltd guitarist Keith Levene told author Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. The post-punk pioneers were already blowing apart rock music with their long, repetitive, often improvisatory songs, and Metal Box rethought the album format itself — three 45 rpm LPs to be treated like 12-inch disco singles, all annoyingly crammed into an unwieldy canister. “With Metal Box, the cover came first, both mentally and physically,” frontman John Lydon told Classic Rock. “We spent most of the advance on it, so making Metal Box presented us with a real challenge because we didn’t have any money left for recording sessions.” —C.W.

Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Punisher’

Phoebe Bridgers’ excellent pandemic-era album has a cover that represents everything we were feeling at the time: fear, loneliness, heartbreak, and the secret wish for extraterrestrials to scoop you up into the sky and get you the hell out of here. Bridgers and photographer Olof Grind took a 24-hour road trip through the California desert, scouting for a location. “I always love a good adventure while shooting, and driving out in a pitch-black desert at 3 a.m. on dirt roads definitely added to my excitement,” Grind said. Bridgers made the skeleton suit her signature look, wearing it on the entire Punisher album cycle and tour. And it’s still impossible not to think of Grind’s image when you listen to songs like the gorgeously devastating “Moon Song” and the strangely romantic “Garden Song.” —A.M.

Offset, ‘Set It Off’

Designed and art-directed by Amber Park, the cover image for Offset’s Set It Off shows the Atlanta rapper tumbling through the sky as the world explodes around him. The image represents modern rap’s shift toward Wagnerian-size drama, with Offset as another kind of heroic survivor, outlasting and overcoming his many controversies. He wears sequined socks and gold gloves, which nod toward his fascination with Thriller-era Michael Jackson. And the image is constructed upside down, making it appear like he’s falling into the sky, not out of it. “I wanted it to be an art piece,” he told Our Generation Music. “It’s like I’m falling down but I’m going up.” —M.R.

Slayer, ‘Reign in Blood’

Just how do you illustrate lyrics like “Raining blood from a lacerated sky/Bleeding its horror, creating my structure/Now, I shall reign in blood”? Slayer producer and label head Rick Rubin turned to political cartoonist Larry Carroll, who tapped into his inner Hieronymus Bosch to create a mixed-media representation of hell with a goatlike deity, decapitated heads, and murderous black angels. “If I remember correctly, [Slayer] didn’t like the cover I did for Reign in Blood at first,” Carroll told Revolver in 2010. “But then someone in the band showed it to their mother, and their mother thought it was disgusting, so they knew they were onto something.” Carroll subsequently created similar hellscapes for Slayer’s South of Heaven, Seasons in the Abyss, and Christ Illusion albums, producing some of the scariest covers in music. —K.G.

Slint, ‘Spiderland’

The members of Slint were just teenagers when they came together in drummer Britt Walford’s Louisville,Kentucky, basement to make the eerily expansive indie rock they’d capture on their epochal 1991 sophomore album, Spiderland. That mix of youthful exuberance and youthful aloneness comes through in the album’s black-and-white cover, which shows them smilingly treading water in a local quarry. The photo was taken by their friend Will Oldham, who’d soon be making his own name with Palace Brothers and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. “We’re just all being youthful and happy,” guitarist Dave Pajo told Rolling Stone’s Hank Shteamer years later, describing the band’s attitude at the time. “When you’re younger, everything is so life-and-death and huge.” —J.D.

Lauryn Hill, ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’

The wood carving at the center of Lauryn Hill’s only official studio album to date is both inspired by artwork for the Wailers’ 1973 album Burnin’ and by the album title itself. “She already had some great ideas that were inspired by the album title,” Columbia art director Erwin Gorostiza told Okayplayer in 2021. The two developed a plan to arrange a photo shoot at Hill’s alma mater, Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. After photographer Eric Johnson snapped images of her, they decided to select one of them as source material for an illustration that resembles something made by a wayward, “miseducated” student on a school desk. The result vividly reflects Hill’s rustic melding of hip-hop, R&B, and reggae sounds, and her journey to find clarity in a world riven by relationships and desire. —M.R.

Big Brother and the Holding Company, ‘Cheap Thrills’

Counterculture cartoonist Robert “R.” Crumb drew the cover for the 1967 debut by Big Brother and the Holding Company, a psychedelic comic strip that tells the album’s story in each of its songs. The artist laid down the cover after watching the band from backstage at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom: “He really wasn’t into our music, but it didn’t matter,” drummer Dave Getz recalled. It really didn’t: Crumb still captured the wild, woolly spirit of Janis Joplin and her bandmates, even if he’d intended for what became the front cover to serve as its back sleeve. —M.J.

Ani DiFranco, ‘Up Up Up Up Up Up’

Modern folk-music icon Ani DiFranco built her enduring success on a mix of anti-capitalist commitment, aesthetic ingenuity, DIY community, and her electric charisma. You can see all of those elements in the multidimensional cover image for her 1999 album. It’s a statement of playful substance over predictable image, but even with her face pointed to the ground she still completely commands your attention. The cover photo was taken by her friend and longtime manager Scot Fisher, who helped DiFranco found the Buffalo, New York-based label Righteous Babe. “We were a mom-and-pop operation,” she recalled in a 2016 interview. “Scot was the photographer and the dude who answered the phone, and I was the graphic designer who would paint the album covers.” —J.D. 

Silkk the Shocker, ‘Charge It 2 Da Game’

The garish, maximalist, larger-than-life album covers of Pen & Pixel defined the late-Nineties CD era, when Southern rap labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Suave House began to topple the East Coast/West Coast monopoly. Brothers Aaron and Shawn Brauch covered hundreds of album covers with their Photoshop wonderlands of luxury cars, sparkling gems, and bottles of champagne. The cover of Silkk the Shocker’s second album — jeweled lettering, gleaming pinky ring, skewed perspective, gold “Ghetto Express” card — is a classic of the form. “The longer you hold that CD cover in your hand, the more possession-oriented you become,” Shawn told Red Bull. “People would comment later, ‘Yeah, man, the album wack, but the artwork was cool.’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s my job done, right?’” —C.W.

Neil Young, ‘On the Beach’

“Album covers are very important to me,” Neil Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “They put a face on the nature of the project.” This is especially true of 1974’s On the Beach, Young’s devastating rumination on Watergate, the recent breakup of his marriage, his recent albums’ commercial failure, and the overall dissolution of the Sixties dream. It’s all evident on the cover, where he’s seen standing on the Santa Monica shore, his back turned away from the camera. The tail light of a 1959 Cadillac emerges from the sand, surrounded by gaudy yellow patio furniture. The headline from a local L.A. paper reads “Sen. Buckley Calls for Nixon to Resign.” Young spontaneously purchased the items with art director Gary Burden while stoned on “dynamite” weed. —A.M.

Devo, ‘Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!’

“What we focused on was inane, mundane, dumb, mass stuff,” said Devo’s Gerald Casale to NBC. “We liked to go to Kmart and Gold Circle because it had all this discount stuff. That’s when I found, in an aisle of discontinued sports goods, the Chi Chi Rodriguez golf-ball package.” For its debut, the band wanted to use the image of the flamboyant golfer they found on a $1.99 box of balls; however, Warner Bros. lawyers intervened. They quickly found a composite photo of four U.S. presidents that Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh called “perfectly hideous” and had it airbrushed onto Rodriguez’s face. —C.W.

Frank Ocean, ‘Blonde’

The now-iconic photograph of Frank Ocean in the shower as he cups his hand over his face, his hair dyed in lime green, was the result of a lengthy 2015 collaboration between him and German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The image plays to both men’s interest in otherness, not only as a sign of queer identity, but also as a method of presenting a distinctly iconoclastic yet public self. Ocean and Tillmans were brought together for a photo shoot by the fashion magazine Fantastic Man. Blonde introduced Tillmans, who had been documenting underground culture since the Eighties, to a new generation. It also introduced a defining image of the singer, one both invitingly mysterious and alluringly unknowable. —M.R.

Minor Threat, ‘Minor Threat’

Minor Threat epitomized American hardcore punk at its most fiercely independent. You see that spirit in the classic image of singer Ian MacKaye’s brother Alec sleeping on the steps of Dischord House, where so many of the D.C. punk kids lived and where the band ran their label. Alec’s shaved head, his scuffed work boots, his rumpled clothes, his folded arms, his punked-out exhaustion — it summed up the whole ethos of Minor Threat. The image has been a symbol of DIY realness ever since, inspiring many tributes, most famously the cover of Rancid’s 1995 …And Out Come the Wolves. No wonder corporate America wanted a piece — Nike tried to appropriate it for their bizarre 2005 “Major Threat” ad campaign, until public outrage shut it down. —R.S.

Jay-Z, ‘The Blueprint’

For The Blueprint, Jay-Z turned to Jonathan Mannion, a photographer who had shot all of Jay’s covers since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. Mannion took inspiration from Jocelyn Bain Hogg, a British photographer who snapped South London gangster Dave Courtney giving a lecture at Oxford Union, for his book The Firm. Mannion’s shot replicates the aerial framing, finding Jay-Z looking away from the camera, holding court over a group of minions only identified by their shoes. Designer Jason Noto of Def Jam’s in-house creative department the Drawing Board cast the entire image in faded blues and grays. In 2021, Jay sued Mannion over prints the photographer sold from their many sessions. The two settled out of court in 2023. —M.R.

Taylor Swift, ‘Folklore’

Taylor Swift stepped back from her songs on her eighth album: “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t,” she posted upon Folklore’s release in 2020. Its striking monochromatic cover — a departure from the candy-coated Lover front, and the first collaboration between Swift and photographer Beth Garrabrant — is similarly situated in the wide world, with the coat-clad singer seeming tiny amid mist-cloaked trees and mossy terrain, gazing upward with a pondering expression. —M.J.   

Shakira, ‘Dónde Están los Ladrones?’

After wrapping up her 1997 Pies Descalzos Tour, Shakira landed in Bogotá, Columbia, to discover her briefcase had been stolen … and in it, the songs she’d written for her next album. She’d decidedly named her 1998 record “Dónde Están los Ladrones?” or “Where Are the Thieves?” — and conceptualized the theft as an allegory for thefts of all kinds, including that of Columbia by corrupt politicians, drug lords, and paramilitaries, during what’s since been described as the “Dirty Wars.” Shot against a statement hot pink, Shakira posed for her album cover donning edgy purple braids, with extended dirt-covered palms. “The dirty hands represent the shared guilt,” she said of her cover. “No one is completely clean.… In the end, we are all accomplices.” —S.E.

King Crimson, ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’

King Crimson knew they were onto something big when they pieced together “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the snarling, sweeping portrait of an unraveling collective consciousness that would open their 1969 debut LP. And when artist Barry Godber dropped by London’s Wessex Studios to show them the cover painting that lyricist Peter Sinfield had commissioned, they knew they’d found the perfect visual counterpart. “This fucking face screamed up from the floor, and what it said to us was ‘schizoid man’ — the very track we’d been working on,” bassist-vocalist Greg Lake later recalled. Pairing the image with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire,” it’s hardly a leap to imagine the cover figure looking on in horror at the atrocities the song describes. —H.S.

Weyes Blood, ‘Titanic Rising’

On the cover of Titanic Rising, Natalie Mering — the California singer-songwriter who records as Weyes Blood — appears inside an eerie deep-sea installation, hovering between a brass bed and a white wicker desk, with posters adorning the walls. The image perfectly captures the themes of Titanic Rising: millennial doom, the climate crisis, the isolation of technology, and water itself. “This bullshit initiation into culture — for most young people in the Westernized world, it’s their bedroom,” she told Rolling Stone. “They hang up posters of their favorite celebrities and their favorite movies, and they formulate these ideas about life and what life should be like, and what they want. And it’s all an incubation of capitalist bullshit. But it’s still very sacred.” —A.M.

Lil Wayne, ‘Tha Carter III’

“I’m going to be so honest with you: I don’t know Tha Carter III, Tha Carter II, Tha Carter One from Tha Carter IV. And that’s just my God’s honest truth,” Lil Wayne told RS last year. “I believe that [God] blessed me with this amazing mind, but would not give [me] an amazing memory to remember this amazing shit.” Fair enough. But the cover of Tha Carter III, Wayne’s best album, is unforgettable. Rappers have made iconic album artwork using baby photos before — think Ready to Die, Illmatic — but Wayne took it a step further, giving Baby Weezy a diamond pinky ring and some facial ink, for an image that summed up the unstoppable, no-fucks-given charm that made him a superstar. “We wanted to bring something new to it,” art director Scott Sandler said. “What if we put the tats on the baby?” —A.M.

New York Dolls, ‘New York Dolls’

Rolling Stone’s review of the New York Dolls’ 1973 self-titled debut refers to the punk pioneers as “mutant children of the hydrogen age.” This comes across perfectly on the album cover, which shows the androgynous quartet slumped together on a couch, slathered in makeup and hairspray. It was created by Vogue photographer Toshi Matsuo after the Dolls nixed a plan by their label to shoot them near vintage dolls in an antique shop, sans makeup. “That couch we were sitting on, we found that on the street and brought it up,” said guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. “We put the white fabric on it — I remember tacking it on.” The look was so ahead of its time that imitators wouldn’t come along until hair metal arrived a decade later. —A.G.

The Smiths, ‘The Queen Is Dead’

Throughout the Smiths’ feverishly productive run in the mid-Eighties, lead singer Morrissey selected photo stills depicting midcentury movies and pop-culture moments for their singles and albums. His pick for the Smith’s third album, The Queen Is Dead, may be their most iconic: an image of French superstar Alain Delon in the film L’Insoumis, lying in distress. The concept of this beautifully handsome yet controversially macho star — the Brad Pitt of the Sixties — as a “queen” nods toward Morrissey’s subversive sense of humor. The layout, handled by Rough Trade’s Caryn Gough, casts the photo in shades of dark green, making Delon appear as a doomed royal in their death throes. —M.R.

Tyler, the Creator, ‘Igor’

The cover for Tyler, the Creator’s fifth solo album is striking in its minimalism: a pained close-up of the California-born polymath combined with a typewriter-font assertion that he was responsible for all the album’s sonics, and a salmon backdrop that feels aggressive despite its pastel hue. Igor further established Tyler as an artist willing to push himself into new realms, and the cover announces that to anyone flipping through a collection. “We work well together because I believe in what he wants to create,” photographer Luis “Pancho” Perez, who worked with Tyler to create the cover, told Complex in 2019. “Nothing has really changed his confidence in himself.” —M.J.

Radiohead, ‘Kid A’

At the close of the 20th century, Radiohead were an acclaimed British rock band desperate to be anything else. That jittery unease fueled the artwork that Thom Yorke created with his old friend Stanley Donwood, riffing on ancient mythology and paranoid dreams in late-night sessions. “There was an air of chaos suddenly, and that was really fun,” Yorke told Rolling Stone years later. The cover they chose for Kid A has all the unsettling intensity of the music Yorke was making with his bandmates: an icy, forbidding mountain range, like something out of a digital nightmare. “It was almost a dark fairyland,” Donwood said. “A very lonely, cold, and quiet place, apart from the punctuations of terrible war.” —S.V.L.

Blur, ‘Parklife’

Designers Rob O’Connor and Chris Thompson took to London’s streets for inspiration as they were brainstorming a cover for what would go on to be Blur’s era-defining 1994 album. While peering in the window of a betting lounge for sports-related ideas, they found a concept that had bite: “We centered in on the greyhounds,” Blur guitarist Graham Coxon told Brit-pop chronicler Dylan Jones in 2022’s Faster Than a Cannonball, “because they had an aggressiveness we liked. We chose the ones with the most teeth. They look deranged, just longing to kill, and there’s a bizarre look in their faces. You just don’t get that look with a footballer — well, maybe a little bit.” The image of racing dogs underscored the hunger of the best Brit-pop, and set Blur apart from their more glam-minded peers. —M.J.

Willie Nelson, ‘Red Headed Stranger’

On his legendary 1975 opus, Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson tells the tale of a preacher on the run after killing his own child and unfaithful wife. Nelson stepped into the role of an outlaw on the cover (designed by Monica White), which showed his unruly image framed in the style of a ‘Wanted’ poster. Red Headed Stranger was country music’s first concept album, a watershed for the outlaw-country movement that included Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, and its cover went a long way toward creating the subgenre’s rough-hewn iconography.  —G.M.

Billie Eilish, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’

Just like the music, the cover of Bille Eilish’s classic debut drops you right into her creepy-crawly teenage nightmares. Photographer Kenneth Cappello collaborated with Eilish on a 12-hour shoot, ending up with a deeply unsettling shot of Eilish sitting on bed, her eyes entirely white, pupils obscured. Eilish brought in sketches of her inspirations for the cover, which included the Babadook. (“I got so much inspiration from The Babadook,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019.) “She’s all in,” Cappello told MTV News. “Those wide eyes? Those aren’t in post, those are contacts. She goes all in on everything.”

FKA Twigs, ‘LP1’

The hauntingly plastic visage of British musician FKA Twigs dominates the cover of LP1, a bizarre representation of her disturbingly mutant electronic pop. It was constructed by Jesse Kanda, who met her via his longtime friend and collaborator Arca. “We did the front cover for her album in my room, with my shitty lights, and no people running around. I have the most control when I do everything myself,” he told Dazed in 2014. He sculpted a photograph of her using 3D technology, manipulating and warping the image, then painted over the results. Longtime XL Recordings art director Phil Lee and Twigs collaborated on the aquamarine blue design that spotlighted Kanda’s imagery. In 2015, the cover earned a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package. —M.R.

Grace Jones, ‘Nightclubbing’

The famous Nightclubbing photo of Grace Jones dressed in an Armani suit, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was the culmination of a tempestuous personal and professional relationship between her and photographer Jean-Paul Goude. The image seemed as much a cheeky New Wave commentary on corporate Eighties style as an exercise in gender-bending fashion. But despite observers’ claims (and criticism) of how Goude crafted and manipulated her image, Jones has always asserted that she was in control of the process. “Jean-Paul would say, later…that he had created me,” she wrote in her 2015 autobiography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. “I knew that wasn’t the case, that I was creating myself before I met him.”–M.R.

R.E.M., ‘Murmur’

Lots of Southern bands had used pastoral imagery on their album covers to underscore their music’s down-home difference. R.E.M. flipped the script with the cover of their debut, Murmur. The front image shows a goth-y woods overrun by kudzu — a weed that grows so fast it covers and kills any plant in its way. The back image is of a disused train trestle near the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia. Taken together, it was a perfect reflection of the band’s mysterious, enveloping sound. The “Murmur Trestle” immediately became part of local lore, defended by R.E.M. fans when it was approved for demolition in 2019. “Why do they need to preserve it?” said photographer Sandra-Lee Phipps, who took both photos. “It was just done randomly. Somehow it ended up mattering to people.” —J.D.

Van Halen, ‘1984’

When Warner Bros. designer Margo Nahas heard Van Halen’s original concept for the cover of their sixth LP — four dancing women made out of chrome — she quickly passed. (Already a seasoned illustrator of chrome, she “couldn’t imagine doing all the reflections,” she later said.) But when her husband, fellow designer Jay Vigon, brought her portfolio to the band, they were instantly drawn to her now-iconic painting of an angelic baby grinning and holding a smoke, which she’d modeled off a friend’s son. “I took a picture of him, took him candy cigarettes, which he proceeded to eat, every single one, after a brief tantrum, of course,” Nahas recalled in 2020. The impish yet innocent image encapsulated the lovable mischief of the band’s “Hot for Teacher” era. —H.S.

Lorde, ‘Melodrama’

For her highly-anticipated sophomore album, Lorde crafted a delicate cover that evoked Melodrama’s emotional heft. Painted by the Brooklyn artist Sam McKinnis — whom Lorde connected with via a fangirling email — and inspired by an image that McKinnis had made riffing on the cover of Prince’s Purple Rain, the cover is based on a photograph McKinnis took of Lorde as she lay in bed. Drenched in the shadows of a moody, electric blue that could swatch a dance floor or the walls of a club bathroom, with warm cracks of daybreak creeping on Lorde’s cheek, the image depicts her in the morning after a night of dancing with “all the heartache and treason” she sang about on the album. —M.G.

Marvin Gaye, ‘Here, My Dear’

There are breakup albums, and then there’s Here, My Dear, Marvin Gaye’s brutally honest unpacking of his in-progress divorce from his first wife, Anna Gordy. The serene front cover shows Gaye depicted as a Roman statue, standing in front of a lavish temple — its cornerstone bearing the inscription “Love and Marriage” — next to a sculpture of embracing lovers. But by the time you see the back-cover image, the sculpture and the temple have caught fire and are actively crumbling, and the inscription on the building now reads “Pain and Divorce.” If all that weren’t bleak enough, on the inner sleeve, we see a couple’s hands engaged in a Monopoly-like board game, with all their earthly possessions at stake between them, and the scales of justice looming ominously in the background. —H.S.

DJ Shadow, ‘Endtroducing’

DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut LP was constructed almost entirely out of samples, a love letter to funky, crackly old vinyl that was released into a world where most record stores only sold CDs. The cover image shows two of Shadow’s buddies from the Bay Area hip-hop label SoulSides, producer Chief Xcel and rapper Lyrics Born, going through the stacks at Records, a local institution (now closed) that billed itself as “a speciality shop dealing in out-of-print phonograph records.” As Shadow said of the store in the documentary Scratch, “Just being in here is a humbling experience because you’re looking through all these records, and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams, in a way.” —J.D.

Sonny Rollins, ‘Way Out West’

“I was really living out my Lone Ranger thing,” Sonny Rollins said in 2009, reflecting on his Western-themed classic Way Out West. He wanted a cover that evoked the Westerns he grew up on, so photographer William Claxton suggested they pick up a ten-gallon hat, a holster, and a steer’s skull and head to the Mojave Desert, where he shot Rollins holding his saxophone and staring down the camera like a hardened cowboy. Some were critical of what they saw as the photo’s hokey premise and incorrectly assumed that Rollins was pressured into it. “Many people thought wrongly over the years that I was asked to pose that way or that the material was forced on me, because California was thought to be a movie place and a commercial place,” he said. “Not true. I was given complete control.” —H.S.

Janet Jackson, ‘The Velvet Rope’

With its themes of self-care, depression, and the then-taboo exploration of Black female queerness, The Velvet Rope may be Janet Jackson’s most intimate full-length work. Ironically, its cover depicts her clothed, not topless as on the Patrick Demarchelier-photographed shot on her previous album, 1993’s Janet. Photographer Ellen von Unwerth captured Jackson dressed in a black turtleneck with her head pointed downward. Meanwhile, the deep-red background tipped her audience to the burning emotions inside Jackson, as if she’s struggling to get it all out. (The interior photographs, shot by von Unwerth and Mario Testino, are more risqué.) “You know people they still ask me about it,” said von Unwerth of the enigmatic cover. “It became more iconic in a way.” —M.R.

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Loveless’

Swoosh-y abstraction was a go-to look for turn-of-the-Nineties shoegaze bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Swervedriver. But those bands usually worked in moody blues and grays. My Bloody Valentine’s choice of hot pink (a color you were more likely to see on a Poison record) for the cover of their 1990 masterpiece Loveless grabbed your eye with a look as undeniably loud as the band’s stomach-rattling guitar swells. MBV mastermind Kevin Shields and visual artist Angus Cameron collaborated on the image, taking a screengrab of Shields’ hands on his guitar from the band’s Cameron-directed “Too Shallow” video and turning it into a blur of radiant abstraction. —J.D.

Beastie Boys, ‘Licensed to Ill’

The cover of the Beastie Boys’ debut is as brash and playfully referential as the Beasties’ sound. Producer Rick Rubin got the idea for the cover — a Boeing 727 with a Beastie Boys logo and a tail number that, viewed in the mirror, says “eat me” — while reading through the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods and spying a photo of the band’s private jet. “I wanted to embrace and somehow distinguish,” he said in the book 100 Best Album Covers, “in a sarcastic way, the larger than life rock & roll lifestyle.” Artists Stephen Byram and World B. Omes crafted the gatefold cover with a surprise in mind — at first it looks almost majestic, but when seen in full, the plane is revealed to have crashed, its front end crumpled. The resulting image provides another layer of irony: The plane, many have noted, looks like a joint smashed in an ashtray.

Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’

Joni Mitchell wrote Hejira while traveling cross-country, so she could have slapped a photo of an open road on the cover and called it a day. Instead, it was only the beginning. The sleek road sits inside a black-and-white Norman Seeff portrait of Mitchell, “haunted, like a Bergman figure,” wearing a beret and holding a cigarette. Around 14 photos were used for the cover and sleeves — including figure skater Toller Cranston out on the ice, to complete the wintry vibe — and an airbrush was used to make the images on the cover look like one cohesive illustration. The effort paid off, creating a beautifully intricate album cover to represent delicate tracks like “Amelia” and “Song for Sharon.” Looking back, Mitchell said it’s her favorite cover of hers: “A lot of work went into that.” —A.M.

Sonic Youth, ‘Goo’

Sonic Youth’s long run as the official band of America’s avant-garde art scene means that their catalog is full of iconic images, like Daydream Nation’s Gerhard Richter candle painting and Dirty’s Mike Kelley rag doll. But none are as enduring as the black-and-white sketch that SoCal punk legend Raymond Pettibon contributed to Goo. The pair of impossibly cool young sociopaths and their neo-noir tale of sex and death have been endlessly memed since then, but back in 1990, they made execs at the band’s new major-label home nervous — which was kind of the point. “That was so important at the time,” Lee Ranaldo later told biographer David Browne. “In a way, we were still in that world … that our ‘scene’ was making.” —S.V.L.

Rosalía, ‘El Mal Querer’

Rosalía tapped a longtime internet friend, the Spanish Croatian artist Filip Ćustić, to conceive what he’s described as a “visual universe” for her 2018 flamenco-pop masterwork, El Mal Querer. The two chatted over Whatsapp to devise an image for each track that would “update Spanish imagery to the 21st century.” In consistency with the record’s theme, Ćustić depicts Rosalía as an ethereal queen of the seraphs, a symbol of the divine feminine, liberated from the tyranny of a controlling man. “She emerges naked from the heavens, as if she were a goddess more than a virgin, saying, ‘This is me, and this has been my learning process,’” explained Ćustić in Spanish newspaper El Pais. —S.E.

Lana Del Rey, ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’

On the cover of her sixth album, Lana Del Rey seems to be pulling us into her world of deconstructed American myths, as she clings to the Kennedy-esque figure of Jack Nicholson’s grandson Duke Nicholson. From its oil-painted blue sky to Del Rey’s bright-green nylon jacket, the image’s retro-modern feel perfectly reflects the way the music inside offers her own 2010s vision of fading Laurel Canyon glory. The cover photo was taken by Del Rey’s sister, Caroline “Chuck” Grant, who has collaborated with the singer on a number of music videos and photo shoots (including a 2023 cover of Rolling Stone UK). “She captures what I consider to be the visual equivalent of what I do sonically,” Del Rey said in a 2014 interview. —G.M.

T. Rex, ‘Electric Warrior’

Few rock sleeves feel as purposefully barren as the Electric Warrior cover, which finds glam god Marc Bolan suspended, along with his guitar and amp, in what might as well be an interstellar void. Using a live-image shot by Kieron Murphy, Hipgnosis designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell added a striking gold halo that helped turn Bolan into a visual icon at precisely the point when he was completing his metamorphosis from flower-child folkie to consummate rock & roll dandy. “Black and gold, the metal guru in full force,” Beck once wrote of one of his favorite album-art specimens. “This is what we want a rock cover to look like.” —H.S.

A Tribe Called Quest, ‘The Low End Theory’

The cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s second album features an unnamed model photographed by Joe Grant. She’s kneeling in black shadows, her body covered in green and red paint. It’s partly inspired by Ohio Players’ memorable 1970s run of covers that depicted women in freaky and suggestive positions. “I wanted a white background for the shot, but they flipped it and made it black,” said group leader Q-Tip in the 2005 book Rakim Told Me. All of the Low End Theory’s visual elements, from the woman in body paint to the red-black-green color scheme reminiscent of the Pan-African flag, became defining elements for Tribe moving forward, and a signature for their deep-rooted and jazz-inflected bohemian sound. —M.R.

Björk, ‘Homogenic’

The making of Homogenic was a fraught time for Björk, as she adjusted to a new level of global fame and the suicide of Ricardo López, a disturbed fan who mailed a letter bomb to her London home. After spotting a striking fashion photo created by photographer Nick Knight and designer Alexander McQueen, she enlisted them to sum up the various emotional currents in her life in an arresting hyperreal portrait. The blend of cultural elements — a Japanese kimono, a European manicure, Maasai neck rings, and a Hopi “butterfly whorl” hairstyle — reflected Björk’s perception of herself as a global citizen. As she later said: “We were trying to make this person that was under a lot of restraint, like long manicure, neckpiece, headpiece, contact lenses — still trying to keep the strength.” —H.S.

Judas Priest, ‘British Steel’

Judas Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton put in his time at the British Steel Corporation, working for the steel producer for five years before his band — who produce a different kind of heavy metal — decided to name their sixth album, British Steel. The title clicked with art director Rosław Szaybo and photographer Bob Elsdale, who created a giant razor blade out of aluminum with the band’s logo on it. Szaybo volunteered to hold it for the shot. “A lot of people looked at it and were really quite horrified,” Elsdale told Revolver. “The edges of the blade seemed to be cutting into Rosław’s flesh, because he was really gripping it quite hard. But that wasn’t the case — it actually had blunt edges. It wasn’t bloody, but it had an element of drama.” —K.G.

Sleater-Kinney, ‘The Hot Rock’

“It’s a labyrinthine record,” Carrie Brownstein wrote of Sleater-Kinney’s fourth LP, The Hot Rock, in her memoir, “sad, fractious, not a victory lap, but speaking to uncertainty.” Following up on their 1997 breakthrough, Dig Me Out, Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss were working through interpersonal struggles while facing more scrutiny than ever before. The cover photo by Marina Chavez, showing the band standing on a Portland, Oregon, street corner, captures that heavy energy: Tucker and Weiss each stare toward the curb, the drummer looking almost trepidatious, while Brownstein holds up her hand, hailing a cab, her face bearing a disgruntled expression. Like the jewel thieves in the 1972 heist film that gave the album its name, the trio had no choice but to get a move on and meet their moment. —H.S.

David Bowie, ‘Diamond Dogs’

David Bowie closed out his glam era with the decadent apocalyptic excess of Diamond Dogs, a concept album set in a crumbling America of the future. “When we got to Diamond Dogs,” he later said, “that was when it was out of control.” The deranged spirit extended to its cover, designed by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, which depicted Bowie as a grotesque half-man/half-dog, including genitals on his twisted body. Bowie’s pose on the cover was inspired by a 1926 photo of singer Josephine Baker. Just as the album was ready to get shipped to retailers, Bowie’s record label pulled the cover and had it airbrushed into something less offensive. Some copies did make it out, and Diamond Dogs remains the most provocative album cover of Bowie’s career. —G.M.

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Quality Control / Motown / Capitol

March 9, 2018

The reign of the self-proclaimed King of the Teens is over. At 20, Lil Yachty has aged-out of that constituency and there are a host of contenders already eager to replace him. In his quest to conquer the whole yung demo, he discovered teens are fickle and manifold, creatures of varying interests prone to unpredictable changes of heart. After being heralded as the harbinger of a new era in rap, the metrics didn’t bear out his impact. His debut, Teenage Emotions , was streamed considerably less in its first week (24,000) than records by the significantly less hyped a Boogie Wit da Hoodie ( 54,000 ), the younger XXXtentacion ( 67,000 ), or Yachty’s self-professed rival , Lil Uzi Vert (100,000). He reckoned with the unimpressive showing by saying, “I disconnected with my fans because I tried to do this other stuff,” the other stuff being his straight-faced struggle raps. Based on those comments, it seemed his next release would surely return to his original model of pure, unadulterated song.

At this point, with his royal status in question, Yachty is at a crossroads. His label, Quality Control, is quietly rebranding him as a Migos understudy, a bit player in their streaming rap empire. But Yachty has other ideas, and he plans to soak up as much bandwidth as possible by fanning his own flames. On Lil Boat 2 , it’s like he’s daring you not to like him. And so his sophomore album is a sequel in name only, a far cry from the candy-coated, bittersweet melodies that made him a viral sensation on the original. He’s a bruiser now, you see, trading in earworms and weightlessness for gravity and outlandish braggadocio. Maybe it’s a masterful troll that thrives off the misdirection. Maybe the most subversive thing he can do at this point is to dismantle his playhouse entirely, becoming the thing no one said he could be. It certainly is one of modern rap’s more bizarre, and fascinating, heel turns.

After opening with the on-brand crooner “Self-Made,” Lil Boat 2 becomes decidedly bar-heavy and grey. It’s made up of nearly 70 percent tuneless rap flexers with dark, creeping synths; “Boom!” embodies its title, and the Pi’erre Bourne -produced “Count Me In” is all muffled low end. This shift in tone is purposeful, almost forceful. It demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be.

The issue is that an album reliant on Yachty’s ability to rap can’t hold up to scrutiny. He is a rather spiritless writer. He only has a couple of rough song ideas. He is incapable of fitting his outsized personality into his pedestrian bars. But the sheer gall of this gambit is occasionally enough to tickle one’s curiosity: Attempted reinventions can be mesmerizing, even when they fail spectacularly. In this instance, he really goes for it. He does triplet flows. He splits punches. He packs cadences and stacks phonetic sounds. Take that, Funk Flex .

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly. His big, showy rap boasts are unimaginative, sometimes predictable, often bafflingly plain in their presentation: “Running to the money like I’m Frank Gore/This ring costs more than a Honda Accord.” He knows how to spend but not how to sell.

The central theme of Lil Boat 2 is simply how rich Yachty is and how broke you are by comparison. He is money-obsessed and really quite bratty about it. “These niggas hate ’cause I’m too rich,” he spits on “Mickey,” the implication being no one actually dislikes him or his music; they’re simply jealous. “I was buying diamonds, you was waiting for tax refunds,” he raps on “Flex,” a song that also works as a nominal diss of his longtime radio nemesis. “Tell your baby daddy I’m richer,” he raps on “Baby Daddy.” You can guess what “Whole Lotta Guap” is about. It isn’t even off-putting that he’s constantly haranguing you about the wealth gap; the real insult is that he flaunts his money in the most mundane of ways.

Duets with PnB Rock and Trippie Redd show that Yachty is still capable of flourishing in a more melodic space, but his refusal to lean into that mode is what makes Lil Boat 2 sound so leaden. Songwriting isn’t his strong suit, and while he’s taken great strides in that area, it was a mistake to build an album out of his raps. It can be entertaining to watch the gears turning, though. There aren’t any moments where he’s noticeably outpaced by his more gifted guests, as he holds his own with NBA YoungBoy , Tee Grizzley , 2 Chainz , and Offset . His best rapping gets packed into “FWM,” a free-flowing outlier that’s as natural and fun as the more whimsical songs in his catalog. His grill-bearing, chain-swinging performances on Lil Boat 2 make me a bit wistful for those—and maybe that was the point. We must suffer through the new Yachty to reassess the old one.

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Karrahbooo Responds to Lil Yachty Ghost-Writing Claims: ‘Who Ain't Write It?'

Late last week, Lil Yachty had what many would consider a meltdown on social media - and his former groupmate is responding to some of the heated allegations.

Yachty hopped on Instagram Live to address both a not-so-flattering clip from his podcast A Safe Place where he and his co-host Mitch got into an awkward conversation about work ethic, and a couple of since-deleted tweets from an X user who claimed to run into his former artist and assistant Karrahbooo at a Red Lobster where she allegedly told the fan she was "kicked out" of the Atlanta rapper's Concrete Boys collective.

Yachty accused Karrahbooo of lying and being manipulative. "Tell people how you verbally abuse people. Don't get on here to make it seem like n-as kicked you out… bullying you? Bro, go ‘head and tell people how you talk to people… You talk to people like they're small, like they're beneath you," he said on IG Live, adding, "This the problem with you new artists. Y'all get poppin' online and then you become more popular than your actual music. You $900,000 in the hole and I got every f-ing receipt."

Boat also claimed he wrote all of her verses and positioned her as the face of Concrete Boys. "I wrote every f-ing verse you've done," he proclaimed. Later saying, "I slowed the beat down, I put 808s specifically on your verse so when it got to your part and the beat dropped, everyone would be like, ‘This girl is the craziest one,'" in reference to her viral On the Radar freestyle.

Well, over the weekend, Karrahbooo addressed her former label boss.

She first responded to him via Instagram Stories, saying, "Put it on yo kid I ain't write these songs miles. Stop da cap and leave me out ur internet shenanigans." She continued, "Stop bullying me big dawg I never said anything you letting random fans get in yo head man up."

Then, during her set at Pepsi Dig In Day in Chicago, Karrahbooo again addressed Yachty's ghostwriting allegations. While performing her song "Running Late," she asked the crowd, "Who ain't write it?… Who ain't write it?" several times.

They both then took more jabs at each other on Instagram. "Don't throw rocks and hide your hand," wrote Yachty on his IG Story, to which Karrahbooo responded by saying, "I never threw rocks and u have my number u big grown bi- leave me alone literally @lilyachty." Adding, "I never said nothing about sh– and I still ain't said nothing about what's really going on I don't want no beef wit you industry people just move on wit ur life stop tryna bring me down when I stay out the way I'm done talking u got it yo character gone speak for itself."

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Lil Yachty Has All-Time Crash Out Session Over Karrahbooo & ‘A Safe Place’ Co-Host Mitch

In case you were living under a rock or just woke up from coma, last night Lil Yachty had a public meltdown on Instagram Live over his former artist Karrahbooo and his podcast co-host and friend Mitch.

First, a clip of his podcast A Safe Place went around of him, Mitch, and Key Glock having a discussion about trying to understand why some want what others have when things got awkward. “Some people gotta eat, gotta feed they family, however the case may be,” Yachty said. “That’s when the militant part comes into play because sometimes, unfortunately, don’t wanna put in work and just want what you have. And that’s a whole different conversation because I ain’t been rich forever.” Adding, “I done been broke before, so who am I to tell this n—a not to go do what you gotta do.

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Mitch disagreed and said you can give them different advice.” However, Yachty then replied, “Like what? You ain’t never had a job. What you gonna tell a n—a to get a job?” The Atlanta rapper then brought up what Mitch would be doing with his life if Yachty wasn’t around and all Key Glock could do was sit there in silence.

Lil Yachty disrespecting his friend in front of Key Glock. pic.twitter.com/owWr6Efkbc — 🌎Zay🌍 (@TLOZAY88) August 22, 2024

Naturally, Rap Twitter had a field day with said clip and criticized Yachty for being a bad friend. Boat addressed the viral clip during his IG Live session and stated he started the podcast to help his friend and said he was going to end it because Mitch wouldn’t defend him on social media. “I aint want to do no motherf—king podcast, n—a, I’m a f—king rapper.”

Lil Yachty goes off on his bestfriend and producer Mitch and cancels their podcast together 'A Safe Place' on IG live, for not clearing up a viral clip "I aint want to do no motherf*cking podcast n*gga, Im a f*cking rapper… I put $400,000 in Mitch pocket…" pic.twitter.com/OX9TloJQ58 — SOUND (@itsavibe) August 23, 2024

Mitch then took to X to clear the air, suggesting him and Yachty joke around and are often brutally honest with each other.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by DJ Akademiks (@akademiks)

As for Karrahbooo, a waitress at Red Lobster set fire to this whole night. X user @C_Staxxz claimed the former Concrete Boy member walked into the restaurant chain to buy some Cheddar Bay Biscuits said she was kicked out of the group after being asked why she left. The user also claimed Karrahbooo told her that “they were really mean to her and bullying her a lot.”

A fan who met KARRAHBOOO claims she said she was "kicked out" of Concrete Boys and bullied within the group pic.twitter.com/NDmuYN467Q — Kurrco (@Kurrco) August 22, 2024

Those two now-deleted tweets bothered Yachty so much, he decided to hop on Live and finally address the situation. He responded by saying, “Tell people how you verbally abuse people. Don’t get on here to make it seem like niggas kicked you out… bullying you? Bro, go ‘head and tell people how you talk to people… You talk to people like they’re small, like they’re beneath you.”

He then claimed that he wrote all of her verses and styled her and the other members of the Concrete Boys. “I wrote every f—king verse you’ve done,” he said. “I dressed you. I dressed all five of y’all n—as, bro. I dressed five n—as every time we stepped out the house. I put an outfit on everybody. I put eight carat earrings in everybody ear. I put three chains on all y’all neck.”

Adding, “We bought a Cartier watch. I gave you that chrome Rolex, bro. You was waiting tables… What are we talking about, n—a? I changed your motherf—king life and you are here lying, talking about some, ‘We bully you’… That sh—t got me f—ked up, bro. You got me f—ked up, bro. You disrespectful, bro. You talk to people crazy. You tell people that they are nothing. You tell people you’re going to spit on them. You tell people they poor and you talk to my f—king label crazy. You claim I was stealing money from you. Stealing money from you how? You ain’t made no money.”

He continued, “This the problem with you new artists. Y’all get poppin’ online and then you become more popular than your actual music. You $900,000 in the whole and I got every f—king receipt.” Boat then brought up her viral On the Radar freestyle and said he was trying to make her pop off and it worked. “I slowed the beat down, I put 808s specifically on your verse so when it got to your part and the beat dropped, everyone would be like, ‘This girl is the craziest one.’”

For whatever reason, Boat finds himself in these situations and even went as far as to claim he was going to stop talking on the Internet . “I’m not doing no more talkin’,” Yachty said on Instagram Live last month. “I don’t got s—t else to say. I’m gone off this internet s—t. I think I’m gone for the rest of the year. I swear to God. I ain’t got s—t else to say.

Karrahbooo has yet to respond.

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Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo’s Feud Escalates With Bullying Accusations

Lil Yachty and his former artist Karrahbooo 's feud escalates with bullying accusations.

Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo Continue Throwing Shots at Each Other

On Sunday (Aug. 25), Lil Yachty hopped on his Instagram Story to address Karrahbooo's claims about writing her own rhymes and being bullied. Karrahbooo was part of Yachty's Concrete Boys collective. Although Yachty didn't directly address the 27-year-old rhymer, his message suggested that he clapped back at her allegations.

"Don't throw rocks and hide your hands," Boat wrote on his IG Story post below.

After catching wind of the Atlanta rapper's message, Karrahbooo posted a lengthy statement on her Instagram Story about supporting others in times of need and alluded to Yachty picking on her.

"I'll never forget this feeling, this chapter of my life. I'll never be the same," Karrahbooo penned in her IG Story. "I'll never forget who was there for me. I done chopped people out/spent my last/slapped folks 4 ni**as. I ride every time naturally, but that's just how I am. Nobody owe me sh*t tbh I'm just taking a mental note. I can't even look at most people da same way. To know the truth and watch a grown man with 12 million followers overly lie on my name and publicly bully me for literally no reason at all while I silently been conquering all da sh*t ni**as been throwing me this whole time behind closed doors. I'll never ignore the signs again, and I will never stop, no matter how much they hate me."

In her next IG Story post, Karrahbooo responded to Yachty's aforementioned message, insisting that they could discuss their issues on the phone. She also stated that she just wanted to make peace with individuals in the music scene.

"I never threw rocks and u have my number you big grown b**ch. Leave me alone literally @lilyachty," she typed in her IG Story post. "I never said nothing about sh*t and I still ain't say nothing 'bout what's really going on. I don't want no beef wit you industry people. Just move on wit ur life. Stop tryna bring me down when I stay out the way. I'm done talking. You got it. Yo character gone speak for itself."

Read More: Lil Yachty Goes Off After Being Accused of Mistreating Best Friend and Cohost Mitch During Podcast Episode

Why are lil yachty and karrahbooo beefing.

Things went south between Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo after a fan shared a post on social media and claimed that after bumping into Karrahbooo at a restaurant, the rapper told her she was kicked out of Concrete Boys and bullied during her time on the label . On Aug. 22, Lil Yachty went live on Instagram and denied Karrahbooo's bullying allegations . Boat said Karrahbooo was actually the one bullying others.

"Tell people how you talk to people," Yachty said in his heated video below. "How you tell my security guard, 'Oh, you homeless. You work for me. You're poor. We above you.' You talk to people like they nothing...Tell people how you verbally abuse people. How you said you gon' spit on me when you see me."

"I been letting you do this whole thing where you act like you a princess and you sweet," he continued. "Stop the front, bro. We have withheld your actions since the beginning of me giving you this career. What the f**k are we talking about, bro. You don't even do nothing. It's so crazy to me, bro. ’Cause I've given you a career, and from time to time, you just disrespect me.

Boat then mentioned that Karrahbooo has a $900,000 debt to his label. Afterward, the Quality Control rhymer leaked his reference track to Karrahbooo's 2023 On The Radar Freestyle , suggesting that she didn't pen the lyrics.

Karrahbooo Claps Back at Lil Yachty's Claims About Writing Her Lyrics

On Aug. 23, Karrahbooo went on her Instagram Story to clap back at Yachty by sharing three songs she claimed to write and highlighted their streaming counts.

"Running Late," boasted over 7 million streams, "Where Yo Daddy," garnered 3 million streams and the On the Radar Concrete Cypher freestyle hit nearly 3 million streams.

Karrahbooo captioned the image, "put it on yo kid i ain't these songs [M]iles[.] Stop da cap and leave me out ur internet shenanigans [tears of joy emoji]."

She continued: "Stop bullying me big dawg [tears of joy emoji] i never said nothing u letting random fans get in yo head man up."

During her performance at the Dig in Day Festival in Chicago on Aug. 24, Karrahbooo suggested that Yachty's ghostwriting claims were false.

"Who ain't write it, who ain't write it," she rapped during her performance in the video below.

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Maybe We Know a Little Too Much About Lil Yachty

By Andre Gee

Last year, I spoke with Lil Yachty about mystique. Our conversation about his Let’s Start Here album got awkward when he told me he didn’t want to reveal too much about its creation. I asked him about plans to release a documentary he recorded about the project, and he told me, “I doubt I’ll drop it. Just like me not wanting to do any of these interviews. I don’t really care to talk about it, [because] you give it all away [when] you pull the curtain back.”

When I asked him if he put a premium on artists with an allure of mystery when he was younger, he told me, “Coming up, you didn’t have all this social media. Even if [they] did an interview, you didn’t get every element of something. It’s the simple things you knew, but they left a lot of room for ‘Wow, how did he make this?’… Which is the beauty in art.” 

“I think Chapter One of my career is extremely oversaturated,” he told me. “I was thinking … I’m easily accessible. I’m on TikTok. I’m on YouTube. I’m on Twitter. I’m just everywhere. I didn’t like that.” But 18 months after our conversation, it feels like Yachty’s would-be triumphant next chapter is being marred by the same overexposure. 

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Yachty’s rap career is defined by a collage of viral moments. His first single, 2015’s “One Night,” went viral on SoundCloud. He came into public consciousness during the 2016 live stream of Yeezy Season 3. His “Minnesota” hit was the score to the hip-hop generational war being waged on rap Twitter, with his ignorance of Biggie and 2Pac’s catalog not helping things. And his Everyday Struggle admission that he didn’t know the full details of his QC contract made him fodder for anyone seeking to soapbox about naive rappers signing bad deals. Yachty saw all of the criticism, and he pushed back, arguably losing the musical charm that made him a distinct artist by trying to prove he could rap. He told me, that during that period, “I was trying to be the spokesman for the new generation because no one else wanted to talk. I felt, ‘I’m going to stand up. I’m going to speak.’”

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But it never stays strictly about the music with Yachty. During a Let’s Start Here listening event, he told the crowd he “wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and not just a SoundCloud rapper, not just a mumble rapper, not just a guy that made one hit.” Some people felt his comments implied that being “just” a rapper was inferior, but he told me that was “absolutely not” what he was trying to say. Regardless of his clarification, the perception of elitism stuck, and was intensified when he surmised that “hip-hop is in a terrible place” during our November 2023 Musicians on Musicians l ive event . 

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During an emotionally charged Instagram Live session, he claimed that he wrote all of Karrahbooo’s music and threw the remaining Concrete Boys under the bus by claiming he dressed all of them. He and Karrahbooo have since been taking to their stories to clap back at each other, making a bad situation worse. Yachty’s currently being lambasted as the kind of person who can’t wait to tell the world what they did for you — you never wanna be that guy. 

Perhaps people are letting the jokes fly for the moment, and Yachty dropping the right song will shift all the attention away from his mic miscues. Maybe Yachty doesn’t care what the public thinks. But it’s interesting to watch someone who’s repeatedly referenced not wanting to be accessible, and wishing he hadn’t opened his mouth, seemingly be unable to help himself from speaking out — in frequently self-sabotaging ways. It feels like the same digital soil that fertilized Yachty’s career is also his quicksand.

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Critic’s NOTEBOOK

‘Ice Cold’: From Biggie to Lil Yachty, Getting Your Shine On

Hip-hop jewelry does a lot of heavy lifting in a new exhibition in Manhattan. It signifies elite membership, romantic courtship and ambition for greatness.

By Seph Rodney

Of the New York museums that would create an exhibition on jewelry associated with hip-hop culture, I would not have imagined the American Museum of Natural History to be one. Yet, “ Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry ” did open this May in a tiny gallery of their Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. With 66 objects, it has an astute premise — that precious stones might attract more attention if regarded through the lens of hip-hop, likely the most widely proliferating music movement that the United States has ever produced.

This show might have been organized to absorb the energy around the 50th anniversary of hip-hop’s inception last year or anticipate the Hip Hop Museum’s opening in the Bronx in 2025. More cynically, some might see “Ice Cold” as an act of penance for the museum’s admitted possession and use of the remains of Indigenous and enslaved people, as the museum faces criticism about the legality and the ethics of these acquisitions. Either way, the venture feels successful. I visited the show twice, on a Thursday evening and on a Monday morning, and each time the gallery was filled with visitors.

The show is beautifully laid out. It’s installed in a small, dark, semicircular gallery, with jewelry in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. The diamonds glint and coruscate as you move across the displays. One could linger, bedazzled and charmed by the bold inventiveness of pieces like ASAP Rocky’s EXO grenade pendant — its “pin” sets the time — displayed on two disks set inside a locket. However, the exhibition offers more, including the concealed and paradoxical implications of wearing these constellations of bling.

The curators, Vikki Tobak, author of “Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History,” Kevin “Coach K” Lee , a founder of the Quality Control music label, and Karam Gill , the director of a documentary on the subject, took the important step of historically situating hip-hop’s ostentatious display of wealth. They refer to an Asante chief in Ghana whose ceremonial dress consisted of copious amounts of gold (though the date of an image referenced turns out to be 2005, which makes the ancestral connection vague).

Shrewdly, the curators also name check each jeweler (when they are known), so they are properly recognized as collaborators and makers alongside the musical stars, such as Ghostface Killah’s eagle bracelet by Jason Arasheben — a massive 14 karat gold wrist cuff with an eagle alighting onto it. The Notorious B.I.G.’s Jesus necklace, made by Tito Caicedo of Manny’s New York, is another icon. It features the head and neck of a figure in gold whose beard, locks, clothing and crown are festooned with diamonds. In terms of the meaning they convey, these chains do a lot of heavy lifting.

For starters, they indicate membership in a very exclusive club, such as Quality Control’s QC necklace for members of its label, including Migos and Lil Yachty. The Roc-A-Fella pendant — which notoriously can’t be bought but has to be bestowed — was made for the eponymous label founded by Jay-Z, Damon Dash and Kareem Burke. And after releasing their 1986 song “My Adidas,” each Run-DMC member received a solid-gold sneaker-shaped pendant by Adidas upon signing an endorsement deal.

Roxanne Shanté of the Juice Crew , and one of the few women rappers to achieve stardom in the early days of hip-hop, has her Juice Crew ring shown here. “Having the Juice Crew ring is like a royalty stance, and you had to represent certain things in the community to wear it,” she says in the show’s text. “It stands for so much: community, loyalty and greatness.”

This jewelry is also used by men in courting rituals. Nelly, who wears a diamond Nefertiti piece in one of the exhibition photos, sings in “Ride Wit Me” (2000): “And if shorty wanna pop, we popping the Crist’ / Shorty wanna see the ice, then I ice the wrist.” Both parties benefit here: The man, bestowing Cristal Champagne, is recognized as a lavish provider; the woman as a valued object deserving of expensive expenditure. What’s unrecognized is just how restrictive these roles can be. (Insightfully, though, queer experience is not ignored in the exhibition, which includes the jeweler David Tamargo’s grill set commissioned by Lil Nas X in 2021 to celebrate the artist’s unabashedly homoerotic single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” )

These pieces also serve as a kind of memorial. On display is the Capital Steez necklace commissioned by Joey Bada ss in honor of his friend Capital Steez, who died in 2012 at 19 years old. Badass became a founding member of the Progressive Era or Pro Era collective along with Steez and other rappers. The necklace features the late rapper’s likeness, in gold, on a diamond-studded Gucci link chain. Pouring one out for a homie who has passed on is a well-known ritual, but imprinting his image on a pendant moves him up into the pantheon of public attention.

But more important, the jewelry also stands for the ambition to be elite, to have the means to spend money extravagantly on personal adornment. And this desire usually outpaces the actual assets that aspirational rappers have at their disposal.

On his 2004 debut album “The College Dropout,” Kanye West, lately Ye, rapped about buying $25,000 jewelry before owning a house, then adding: “I got a couple past-due bills, I won’t get specific/I got a problem with spendin’ before I get it/We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” Ye, one of the most emotionally transparent (and most unstable) voices in hip-hop, articulates its fake-it-till-you-make-it ethos.

This is a critique often leveled at hip-hop culture: that lavish self-presentation — not only jewelry but also clothing and cars — says what you buy , as opposed to what you produce, is the measure of your value; that hip-hop glorifies a lifestyle that is fake or irresponsible and, either way, out of reach for most people on this planet. There is some truth to all of this. But this is not hip-hop’s cross to bear alone. The fault lies in American popular culture at large.

Throughout the 1980s, during hip-hop’s commercial rise, the television show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” flogged the clichéd notion that “making it” consisted of having exclusive wristwatches, automobiles, boats and real estate. In hip-hop culture, rappers say it with their chests, out loud, without shame, in the streets. The trappings are worn for public view, rather than obscured by shell companies.

Still, this shamelessness permits callous and spiteful parts of the culture to feel entitled. “Run the Jewels,” released in 2013 by the eponymous rap duo, encouraged violently stealing jewelry from anyone who seems privileged: “So when we say, ‘Run the jewels’/Just run ’em, baby, please don’t delay me/She clutched the pearls, said, ‘What in the world?’/ And, ‘I won’t give up shit!’/I put the pistol on that poodle and I shot that bitch.”

So, while “Ice Cold” sings from the hip-hop songbook in the key of celebration, it avoids the messier bits of the culture: the misogyny, the persistent though lessening homophobia, the endorsement of physical violence.

I wish hip-hop culture as it is presented here was more aware of and willing to acknowledge these contradictions and brave enough to try resolve them. But this show doesn’t aim to do this. It doesn’t feature the weird parts of hip-hop, underground acts, “conscious” or feminist rap, or hip-hop produced outside the United States. Still, Latin artists are present, including Fat Joe and Big Pun. As are some women rappers, including MC Lyte and Queen Latifah.

The show does take seriously the less expensive signs of Black Liberation that act as adornment, such as DJ Kool Herc’s leather medallion on which he drew his self-portrait and graffiti tag. Kool Herc is one of the pioneers of hip-hop from the early 1970s, so his inclusion is a nod to the historical tradition. Within that tradition is Public Enemy, arguably the most overtly political group of the early 1990s. The show offers clock pendants (adopted on a dare) worn by their hype man, Flavor Flav , and the pendant designed by Chuck D, a founder of the group, that features a Black man caught in the cross hairs of a rifle sight — meant to symbolize the plight of all Black men in the U.S.

But there is an internal contradiction in the show and within hip-hop itself: The people whom the culture purports to represent are, to an extent, ignored in favor of the celebrities who hold the mic and whose voices boom loudest. These are the one percent.

Yet, the orientation toward the street and the desire to show the neighborhood that you have arrived financially impels innovation. T Pain’s “Big Ass Chain” necklace weighs more than 10 pounds and has almost 200 carats of diamonds. According to the caption, he commissioned this piece on a dare from a person he does not even remember.

Tyler, the Creator’s bellhop necklace, a bejeweled golden figure carrying a suitcase in each hand, is my favorite piece not because, as the text conveys, it “incorporates 186 carats in diamonds and 60 carats in sapphire, as well as more than 23,000 handset stones.” Rather, it alludes to the history of Black people laboring in service jobs, such as hotel bellhops, because — on the basis of their race alone — they were denied employment commensurate with their skills, abilities and ambitions. It’s a symbol of Tyler’s success and a nod to his ancestors who could not radiate their gifts so publicly.

I know something about the impulse to celebrate one’s achievements with jewelry. I got my first black diamond ring a few years ago and had to overcome significant anxiety to do it. I grew up in a working-class home that convinced me that extravagance was permissible only after achieving a firmly middle-class life. I don’t know that I have. But after the protracted struggle to attain my doctorate, I felt I deserved it. It wasn’t until the third visit to a Midtown jeweler that I noticed pictures on the walls of various hip-hop luminaries. What connects us is the years we spent working in obscurity, and our willingness to invest in an object that pays gleaming tribute to the work we’ve done.

During a recent public forum , Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of “The 1619 Project,” discussed the importance of Black people presenting themselves in ways that read as authentic. She said, “One of the things I love about Black people is our sense of style and flair.” She argues that in the struggle to achieve success, “What is important is if you make it, make it intact.”

“Ice Cold,” despite its limitations, emphasizes the aspect of hip-hop that genuinely nourishes its audiences: recognizing and acknowledging that we deserve more than simply being intact; we have every right to shine.

Seph Rodney is a curator and art critic in Newburgh, N.Y. He is co-curating a show on sports that should open at SF MoMA in 2024. More about Seph Rodney

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