Exercise #6

Visual Information:

Anyone who knows me knows I love hip-hop music. And one of my favorite parts of a hip hop album or any musical album is definitely the cover art. A good cover can really help the listener to understand what the artist is trying to get across to them visually as well as audibly and can make the difference between a good album and a classic one. Now to be honest, rap albums are rarely very very good because they always seem to have the problem of having the artist's face featured prominently on the cover perhaps scowling angrily or something. This communicates some attitude and emotion but it's never explained and it just comes off as boring.

This is an example of what I'd consider a very good album cover. Shown here is the cover of Ice T's "Home Invasion" album. Now to be honest, I don't listen to too much Ice T and I've never really heard this particular record. However, I came across this in a second hand record store the other day and I was magnetized by what I saw. The art style was older in nature with none of the clarity and sharpness that comes with our modern day production values, but it told a story. In the picture a teenager sits listening intently to a tape, the music conjuring up images that swirl around him enveloping him entirely in the stories that are being told. Right away, this is really great symbolism telling the viewer that this record promises to be an engrossing odyssey taking us to the world of Ice T and back. What really makes this interesting however is the teenager himself who is definitely not the first person you'd think of when you think of Ice T's listeners. He is a young suburban white kid, an acknowledgement on the part of the artist that the main purchasers of any rap album are indeed suburbanite whites. However, instead of kind of ignoring them or shunting them off as not real fans, the artist shows this teen wearing Afrocentric clothing, wood medallions of Africa on his neck, and scattered around his feet, the writings of Malcolm X and other important black figures as well as the tapes of such political rap groups as Public Enemy. Ice T is making the statement here that those who listen to his albums are hearing the voices of the less privileged and through listening to them, the younger generation is learning about their struggles and getting involved. This is further cemented by smoky thought bubbles emanating from a picture of Ice T's face into the teen's ears almost as if the music allowed him to talk to this teen directly. This simple image tells the viewer so much about the record and the mind of the person who made it and even tells a sort of narrative to the workings of music as a whole, making it a truly classic album cover.