Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart takes its title from Chinua Achebe's novel, which borrowed the phrase from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." Art director Kenny Gravillis and The Roots wanted the cover to show what he called "visual failure in society," and they settled on five archival news photographs, sold for a limited time as five different front covers.

The main cover is a stark black-and-white photograph from the 1960s, taken during a riot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, of police chasing two Black teenagers down the street. Its photographer is unknown. "This became the main artwork for a few reasons," Gravillis said, crediting MCA for agreeing to release it. The original plan had been an illustration of The Roots and Sean Combs sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

The alternate covers showed a murdered mob boss's hand, a burned church, a baby in the bombed ruins of Shanghai's South Railway Station in 1937, and a crying child during the 1992 famine in Somalia. The Bedford-Stuyvesant cover was later included in the book The Greatest Album Covers of All Time. The album was released on 23 February 1999.