A Tribe Called Quest‘s third, classic album, Midnight Marauders, is now 20 years old. Almost as iconic as the LP’s sounds is its album cover that featured a who’s who of music industry artists and execs. Now we get a detailed explanation of its creation.
The homies at The Smoking Section caught up with Nick Gamma, who was the art director at Jive Records that designed the cover. Turns out one of the original ideas didn’t pan out.
Reports The Smoking Section:
TSS: How much say did Tribe have in designing the cover compared to your team, and where did you all agree and differ in what it should include?
NG: Q-Tip was the mastermind behind the visuals of all of the Quest albums. I believe he had even designed the circle logo with the stick figures in it. His first idea for Midnight Marauders was to have a bed in a loft in which you could see the skyline of NYC out of the window. Blue light would be emanating from the window on to a beautiful woman on the bed. She would be wearing headphones listening to music. He also wanted her hand on her crotch. That’s where the label rejected the idea.
The next idea was very challenging. Q-Tip wanted to have the striped lady walking in front of the Flatiron building at night. She would have headphone jacks coming out of her head. The connected headphones would then be worn by a large group of people following behind her. She would be like the pied piper of Hip-Hop. We actually went out to the Flatiron around midnight in the freezing cold to shoot this. As we were standing on top of a cargo van, with the photographer shooting, it started to snow. When we went back and reviewed the contact sheets it was very apparent that the idea just didn’t work. With today’s technology it would be a lot easier to have created the scene as Q-Tip envisioned it.
The album as it appears today was our version of the piped piper idea. This direction seemed like it made sense and was doable. Quest was on board and we then proceeded to start to shoot everyone.
Plenty more details are provided that will make any A Tribe Called Quest fan start reminiscing. For example, there is an A Tribe Called Quest font. [Note: WE NEED THAT, SIR.]
Read the full story over at TSS.
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Photo: Jive Records
