UNCOVERED: LL Cool J – “Mama Said Knock You Out” with Def Jam Creative Director Cey Adams.

For three decades and counting Cey Adams has been a fixture wherever creative visuals are habitual. From his early days in the graf and the ’80s downtown art scene (peep his appearance in Style Wars, yo) to his logo, merch and advertising designs for the likes of Run-DMC, De La Soul, and his pals the Beastie Boys to the Chapelle’s Show logo and album artwork for big timers like Maroon 5, he’s been there, done that, and still doing it. Cey may be best known, however, for his extended tenure with Def Jam Records, with which he worked from 1984 to 2002, partnering with Steve Carr as co-founder of the label’s in-house visual design firm, the Drawing Board, and then serving as its Creative Director. With the recent release of the literary monster Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label (Rizzoli) – designed, of course, by Cey – we thought it only right we speak to the man about the story behind one of the label’s most iconic album covers, LL Cool J’s 1991 classic, Mama Said Knock You Out.

READ ABOUT MAKING THE ALBUM COVER AFTER THE JUMP…

Please take us through the process of how this album cover came together.
Cey Adams: It was one of the few times that I remember us having a staff meeting about a particular release. I remember Lyor [Cohen] calling this big meeting, and it was a priority that everybody in the office focused on LL and this release, Mama Said Knock You Out. It’s embarrassing to say, but that was really unusual. Normally it was: okay, this is the record. Sometimes we’d get to listen to music. We’d have sit downs with artists, but never with the whole company being told that this was the priority and we had to kind of get it right, so to speak.

It was a time when LL had already achieved a lot of success. But so had Def Jam. And because of that I think he was starting to feel a little neglected by the label. I think he was at a point where he really wanted to reinvent himself. Walking With a Panther had come before that. The thing about [that album] that was really funny was he had this panther on the cover, but I imagine that he envisioned it more being like a tiger – really looking ferocious. The way that panther was shot it didn’t look ferocious. I’m not saying it was not ferocious in real life. It was. I was there when they did the photo shoot. And LL was not excited about holding the panther. The trainer was just out of the shot. The minute we would stop shooting the trainer would come in and LL would jump out. It was a ferocious animal, but it didn’t come across as being that way in the photograph. It was an idea that wasn’t fully executed. The other thing that’s really funny about Walking With a Panther is I remember LL had his eyes on the inner sleeve made to look like panther’s eyes, and it looks ridiculous in retrospect. Absolutely ridiculous. But again that’s a bad cue that he gave to the art director. (I did not design that record. The folks at CBS did.)

So what was the big meeting about Mama Said Knock You Out like?
Cey Adams: We hadn’t heard the music yet. Everyone’s sitting around the conference room table and LL’s there. I don’t remember him being cocky at all. I remember him being concerned that people in the office would pay attention. I remember him being worried – because at that point in the workday everybody’s busy. They’re already working. They had a lot of other good things that were happening at Def Jam at that point. Before the meeting was called I don’t remember this album being a priority. But the fact was LL was panicked and he made sure that Russell and Lyor understood that. And they said, okay, we’re gonna call everybody’s attention to this. So LL was like, I need you guys to help me. And because he was humbled I think everybody rallied around the cause and wanted to make sure this was a really great record.

I’ve known LL since he was 16-years-old so I never needed a pep talk to rally around any of his projects. I knew him before he was signed to the label. I was with [the Beastie Boys'] Adam Horovitz when he dug LL’s demo tape out of a crate of hundreds and played it for Rick [Rubin]. So I was always going to give him the best that I had to offer. But on this particular day we sat down and we listened to the music and we were all supposed to go away and come back with different ideas for how we could make this record great. I remember listening to the music and thinking, wow, this is much stronger than the previous release. But we didn’t really have a lot of visuals. And so we kind of left and did what we normally do when we brainstormed: talk about hiring different photographers, and so on and so forth.

A couple of days later LL had done a fashion shoot for Italian Vogue. And I guess the photographer, Michel Comte, had gotten him to take his shirt off because he was trying to play up the sex symbol angle. LL walked into the office with a couple of prints that the magazine had made for him. And he was really excited and he wanted everybody to see it. He said, what do you guys think about using this as the front cover? The photo was already cropped so you couldn’t see his face. He said, we could use this as the front cover, and we could use this [other photo] as the back cover. At that time seeing photography that’s larger than 11×17, beautiful black and white prints – it was mesmerizing. I remember thinking that it was some of the most amazing photography that I’d seen up to that point. And we decided to use those photos for the cover.

I thought it would be great if we could not put any type on the cover. But at the time that was a revolutionary idea for a hip-hop album. The rock boys had done it. I believe Miles Davis had already done it with the Tutu record. But nobody in hip-hop had done that. And naturally we got shot down [when we suggested it]. But that’s also why when you look at the type on the record it’s very minimal at the top, almost invisible in a sense. Because I was really trying to get by with as little as possible because I just thought that the photography was so striking. I just thought, okay, I want to come up with some delicate, hand-done type to accompany it. So I did hand lettering for the whole package.

That was not a font?
Cey Adams: No, I did all that by hand. This is all pre-computer. We were still doing things the old fashioned way.

Like you said it’s unlike anything that was going on at the time for hip-hop. Was there any resistance then within the company?
Cey Adams: I think the photography was so beautiful that people could not deny it. It was one of the few times that there was no plan B. There was no debate. Normally, Russell [Simmons] and Lyor and [label executives] Kevin [Liles] and Julie [Greenwald] – they would all have a comment on a variation of a design that they liked. Usually what would happen is you would go to Russell first. If you got Russell’s approval it was very difficult for people to compete with that. Or you’d get Lyor on your side, then everybody else kind of fell in line. But with this particular situation LL walked in, he put the [photos] on the conference room table and we all agreed, and that was the end of it.

The thing I learned from the experience was that you don’t over design something like this. This was designed when LL walked in the door. It was just my job not to fuck it up. That back photo was also cropped exactly like [it appears on the back of the album]. I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. And I wasn’t going to let anybody dictate anything [unnecessary]. There were suggestions of making his name larger, but if you look at the photography where’s it gonna go? You gonna put it over his neck? There’s space on the left and there’s space on the right. And the only reason the “Mama Said Knock You Out” is on the bottom is because it didn’t balance on the top right, it was just too many words. So I said, well, we’ll put it on the bottom right and we’ll just call it a day.

Plus, his name was on his ring. That was the first thing I said when they kept saying his logo has to be bigger. I was like, “His name is on his ring. People know who this is. Please step out of the way and let the photography breathe!”

Some time later [Def Jam marketing executive] Angela Thomas got the brilliant idea to change the type on the front from white to red. It’s something that pains me to this day. It hurts my eyes to look at it, and it just makes me angry that she was even able to do that. But it’s another example of a bad marketing mistake. If we wanted it to be red it would have been red. And now going forward in history it’s always red. If you Google image search the album you’ll see as many covers with red type as you do with white.

Well, in its original form, is this your favorite album cover that you worked on from the Def Jam catalog?
Cey Adams: This one and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. But this one especially because it was the first time we worked with a big name fashion photographer, even if it was just art directing his photography. This is a really important record that came out at that time because I also think that it showed people what was possible in terms of minimalist art direction. But it also reminded people that you didn’t need to have the image of the artist on the front cover big as day, or that you had to see his eyes. Now in retrospect – and I didn’t realize it because I’d never looked at the two together – I realize that this is the look that Jay-Z ended up adopting. Especially if you look at the back cover of Mama Said Knock You Out – the way he’s in the shadow, the cap over the [eyes]. And the fact that when you look at it you still know who it is. This is the very same thing – only we did this 10 or 15 years before. I can’t take credit for it because I didn’t take these photographs, but I can point out the similarities.

The one thing that I did do much later that was a homage to Mama Said Knock You Out was LL’s All World album cover, which was also a direct homage to Miles Davis’ Tutu. If you look at those two album covers together and they seem a little bit similar that was very intentional on my part. That was a situation where I did get to strip away all the type and everything. And I just went in there with the same argument I had with Mama Said: look, LL Cool J is an international superstar, there’s nobody who doesn’t know who he is. That’s when I got the opportunity to work with Albert Watson and I did get a chance to art direct his photography and make it look exactly the way I wanted.

How would you say this album cover changed public perception of LL?
Cey Adams: After the record exploded LL kinda became that guy that’s on the album cover. That was it. Once that record hit I think that was when he really cemented himself in the minds of America as a whole. Because before that he was a teen idol. After Mama Said Knock You Out he was a sex symbol. He was a grown man.

1. • LL Cool J Loves His Life
2. • AUDIO: LL Cool J – “Year of the Hip-Hop” (previously unreleased, 1994).
3. • BEHIND THE VIDEO: Redman – “I’ll Bee Dat” (1998) with Director X.