10. Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill
When the Beastie Boys dropped Licensed to Ill in 1986 it shifted rap music from one space to the next. For one, it was the first rap album to top the Billboard charts, becoming one of the fastest-selling debut records in Columbia Records’ history. Few can dispute that the music on the project was cutting edge and pushed boundaries by merging their punk roots with New York’s rap scene. As the first white group to really blow in Hip-Hop, the cover simply had to be as epic as they were. And it was.
Inspired by the Led Zeppelin biography titled, Hammer of the Gods, Def Jam founder, and producer Rick Rubin came up with the brilliant idea that had the rap group’s private jet crashing into a side of a mountain in such of a way that it conjured up the imagery of a joint been smushed out in an ashtray. So iconic was this image, that Eminem replicated it on his 2018 Kamikaze album.