Cars Of The Hip-Hop Stars

But the downturn hasn't reduced hip-hop's appetite for cars. Jay-Z featured the $350,000 Pagani Zonda featured in his video for the song "Show Me What You Got." Pharrell Williams and Bow Wow drive a $495,000 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster and a Bruce Wayne-esque Lamborghini Murciélago, respectively.

Grammy-winner T-Pain made his Cash Kings debut this year with a cool $15 million--and used some of it to increase his collection to 32 cars. He recently spent $525,000 on the first Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe made for those in North America. He bought the titanium-hooded car on a lark, after happening to see it when he went to pick up his fire-engine red Ferrari 430.

"It's just the ultimate thing to buy, besides a house, that you can actually use," Pain says. "When you go buy jewelry it's like, 'I've seen that. It doesn't really do anything. You wear it and then you take it off.' But with a car, you can drive it, you show it to different people every day. It's like it's your own personal space ship."

Click here to read a Q&A with T-Pain about his car collection.

Click here to see a video of T-Pain and his car collection.

YouTube and viral videos produced by these rappers have only helped fuel the craze for upper-crust British rides.

"The Bentleys and the Rolls-Royces and the Maseratis are becoming real aspirational brands," says Myles Kovacs, the co-founder of automotive magazine DUB. "These guys are achieving the financial status where they are able to afford these particular vehicles, and then they put them in the limelight, and now everybody wants one."

Even the economy hasn't slowed hip-hop's turn to uber-luxe cars. Pain, whose given name is Faheem Najm, co-owns Auto Extremes, a customization shop in Atlanta. He says that although the recession has affected business in his shop, it won't affect the cars that most big-name rappers buy--they all need to appear recession-proof.

"It has turned into, 'I've got more money than you; I can get a better old car; I can get a better, more-expensive car,' " Pain says. "It's all just a battle now."

T-Pain says he'll stick with restoring and improving his vintage cars (save for an occasional Rolls or two) because he can do so much to make them unique. Ferraris and Lamborghinis are all well and good, he says--they lend themselves to customized rims, but that's about it. A 1972 Impala, on the other hand, has a trunk big enough for "600-watt amp, 18s in the trunk" (to quote Coolio), seats amenable to tailored interiors, and a chassis perfectly suited for air compression.

And let's face it--no self-respecting hip-hop singer is complete without a crunk car or two. It's just part of the package.

"Every hip-hop artist, every R&B artist, the main thing they want when they get into the business is a car," Pain says. "It just feels like you've done something right. It feels like you've actually made something out of this career."

In Pictures: Cars Of The Hip-Hop Stars

Complete Coverage: Hip-Hop Cash Kings 2009

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