We really love a spectacularly ridiculous hip hop album cover. You know, one that deploys all the common cliches with copious jewelry, fancy cars, naked women, suits, cigars, a lurking posse, toned and oiled muscles, maybe a skyline, the works. It’s hip-hop, it’s all about showing off and having fun doing it. All of those tendencies and more are featured in StreetLevel’s excellent listicle of 10 Hip-Hop Album Cover Cliches, although we’d like to add one more to the pile: the old, “I wasn’t available for a photo shoot so we hired an illustrator and this is what they did.” Here are some classic examples of the illustrated hip-hop album cover.

(via Asylum)