Jay-Z Talks "Blueprint 3 " Album Cover: "It's Still About Music"

Of all the albums in Jay-Z's catalog, The Blueprint 3's cover is the first not to feature a photo of Jay, so naturally people questioned whether the BP3 image — a cluster of white-painted instruments and three red stripes — that first appeared on the rapper's official Website earlier this week was the real LP artwork. However, Jay-Z confirmed to MTV the photo is the cover for his September 11th Blueprint 3 and gave some insight into the creative decision behind the unconventional art.

"These things are like the forgotten pieces in hip-hop, it's still about music," Jay-Z said of the cornucopia of instruments and equipment, from saxophones to tape decks to turntables to phonographs. "It's not about radio and it's not about making gimmicks and its not about anything, it's still about making music. So those things are out in the corner." Jay's visual aesthetic is supported by BP3's first single "D.O.A.," which called for the end of one of those "gimmicks," Auto-Tune.

As for those three red stripes running horizontally across the cover, Jigga calls them the "original three" and discusses how that's way the number appeared on cave drawings before someone came along and connected the lines to form the "3" we all know now, but it's just a convoluted answer for the fact that this is the third Blueprint and that U2 made emblazoning latitudinal lines on an album cover in vogue. As some of our readers commented in our initial post, the Blueprint 3 cover also bears a strong resemblance to the Secret Machines' Now Here Is Nowhere.

In other Jigga news, the ever-entrepreneurial Roc Nation chief was seen out in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn yesterday filming a RocaWear commercial with director Spike Lee. DumboNYC has photos from the shoot.

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Song Stories

“Tonight's the Night”

The Shirelles | 1960

The lead cut and title track from this girl group's debut album, "Tonight's the Night" was written by 19-year-old bandmember Shirley Owens, who sings lead, and producer Luther Dixon. The band from Passaic, New Jersey met in high school, first calling themselves the Pequellos. The song's frank thoughts about sexual and emotional surrender was racy for the time, but that didn't stop the Chiffons from cutting a similar version immediately after the original came out. "We were the first female group to write some of our own material," band member Beverly Lee recalls. "We did have some say-so in our writing."

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