36. Kwamé, The Boy Genius
It is hard to imagine this, but most rappers from the 80s and 90s were teens when they came out. However, none of them stepped on the scene the way that Kwamé Holland did, which is why he was able to name his debut album Boy Genius and get away with it. On the cover, you see him sitting in front of an old school desktop with a pensive expression. The child prodigy, photo’d with schoolboy spectacles and a scribbled up notepad, could easily be doing his homework. But Nah, the keyboard on the side suggests something different.
It is easy to see that he staged to show his process that led to him putting out a classic, where he wrote the rhymes and produced the beats at 15 or 16 years old. In fact, he probably was perched the same way in 1990 when he also wrote the rhyme for Michael Bivins on the BBD hit song “Poison.” Either way, he represented the brilliance of young Black boys that create the art form that has allowed Drake, Pharrell, and DaBaby to thrive in 2021. The cover is classic because it reminds us that Hip-Hop came out of the incredible imagination of all the boy geniuses dreaming of a new way to express their reality.