The new issue of Wax Poetics features, among other great things, an interview with graphic designer Cey Adams. Adams is best known as an early graffiti writer, in-house designer for DEF JAM records during the 80s, and brains behind plenty of iconic hip-hop album covers (Ready to Die, Fear of a Black Planet) and could've been one of many dudes to make a book that bigs himself up exclusively, but instead he's gone ahead and made a crazy compendium/history of rap inspired design called DEFinition:The Art & Design of Hip-Hop.Among the many things Adams and interviewer Michael A. Gonzales (himself something of a legend, check him out at Riffs & Revolutions) get into is illustration and hip-hop and the connection to comics. Adams was responsible for hiring the great Bill Sienkiewicz to paint the cover of EPMD's Business as Usual. A bunch of years later, Sienkiewicz would do the cover of RZA's Bobby Digital album as well- a great mix of Sienkiewicz's hyper-real style of illustration meeting up with those explosive 70s blaxploitation movie painted posters.
Adams also discusses the hiring of children's book illustrator Ed Renfro to do the art for the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, which as far I can tell, never came to fruition beyond this great T-shirt design:
Another fascinating aspect of the article is Adams discussing the cover art of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet and how the idea, after it was conceptualized by Chuck D, they decided to find "an illustrator that really unders[tood] how the solar system works" and they got B.E Johnson who had worked for NASA! One of the coolest parts of Adams' book is the presentation of Johnson's original painting without any graphics on it, just this Public Enemy logo on the moon and then earth and nebulas and awesome space shit floating around behind it:
