AI Album Covers Have No Place in Hip-Hop
A visual artist who built his career on creating covers for independent rap records laments how AI is bastardizing his life’s work.
Rap album covers are my life. For the past few years, I’ve been able to pay for every meal I ate, every tank of gas, and every rent check with money made from hand-drawing and painting visuals for underground rap records. My methods are thorough: I listen to the full album, take pages of notes, and look at every cover in the artist’s discography to see where they’ve been and where I’d like to see them go. Then I present multiple concepts, sketch, outline, color, shade, and detail. There are usually multiple rounds of editing before I digitally scan my work, clean it up in Photoshop, and format it for physical copies, merch, and posters. Often I meet with the artists in their studios or homes. Sometimes they sleep on my couch.
It is a long and personal process that has pushed my pen a great distance, connected me to real community, and led me to create some of my proudest work. For the cover of Lungs and Phiik’s Carrot Season, the New York duo threw me a stack of references ranging from Hieronymus Bosch, medieval manuscripts, and the documentary Gods of Times Square. I spent a month distilling all this imagery, along with visual references to bars from the album, and painting it at scale with a brush as thin as a nose hair.
The process for Let Me Out, by the New Jersey rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Driveby, was much more open ended, with Sharif asking me to riff on a hellish version of “American Gothic”: The cover depicts a demon police officer restrained by a Black dominatrix posing for a family photo with a child. This is the kind of unrestrained, creatively rewarding work I’ve pursued my entire career.
But now, generative AI is here to offer an alternative to all of this sweat, beauty, and purpose. Rather than spending late nights at my desk figuring out how to best present music made by my incredibly talented friends to the world, our tech dystopia is pushing me to scowl at my phone and wonder, Does the cover for this new record by indie-rap legends the Alchemist and Oh No look like shit on purpose or by accident?
Get access to everything we do at Hearing Things—including the rest of this article, weekly album and song recommendations, and our ever-growing archive of interviews and reports—with a free 30-day trial!
