To be honest with you, this is a topic I never saw myself
writing about. I'm not exactly a Kanye-West-worshipper. My original idea was to
write about album covers in general -- actually, it was to write about album
covers that, in my opinion, were...less than visually appealing. I had in mind
Kanye's most recent album,
The Life of Pablo. But once I began
researching
The Life of Pablo,
I found there are actually some interesting stories and meanings behind Kanye's
album art.
I was surprised to learn that Kanye had been an art school student
before his rap career took off. So Kanye puts consideration into how his albums
are going to look. This was enough to get me to keep looking into what thought,
exactly, Kanye and his designers put into his album art.
When I first looked at The
Life of Pablo album cover, I thought, what’s up with this? It’s not
very visually appealing, and it reminded me of the product of somebody who
threw together a collage on Microsoft Word circa 1998. So I thought looking
deeper into how, exactly, this album cover came to be would be pretty
interesting and maybe enlightening.
The cover was designed by Peter De Potter, a Belgian artist
who often creates artwork that he posts on Tumblr. Looking through a few of his
images, the album art for Life of Pablo seems to fit into his
style -- which is pretty cool. Interestingly, it's similar to the
album artwork for Madonna's Nothing Fails.
There’s even a website dedicated
to allowing people to alter the Life of Pablo album art to add
their own picture.
Kanye does add unique details into the design of his album
covers. College Dropout features a gold border that actually
is taken from a 16th century book of illustrations. According
to Eric Duvauchelle, the designer
of College Dropout’s album cover, Kanye has an admiration for art,
and he wanted to “drastically depart from the typical image of rap at the time
– to bring a sense of elegance and style to what was typically a gangster-led
image of rap artists.”
The Dropout Bear makes his first appearance on this album cover.
It's Kanye West sitting on the bleachers in a bear mascot costume, looking
pretty discouraged and lonely. Duvauchelle found it interesting that though the
mascot is the most popular representation of the school, here is an image of
the mascot sitting all alone and isolated.
Kanye was a student at the American Academy of Art, where
he had received a scholarship to study visual art, before he became a big-time
rapper. He became the college dropout (as the album is named) when he decided
he’d “never be one of the great visual artists of the world.” He didn’t want to
end up in a job in advertising. Then his rap career took off, and so here we
find ourselves.
The theme of the Dropout Bear continues in Kanye's sophomore
album, Late Registration.
The photograph (Sarah A. Friedman) on this album cover was taken in Princeton University --
inside the album booklet there are more photos of the Dropout Bear around
different areas of the campus. It's interesting to note that the Dropout Bear
has shrunk -- he almost looks like a teddy bear. According to Complex,
this is to represent that "the rejuvenation of the [rap] genre would be a
huge responsibility."
Generally, Kanye uses his album cover design to set himself
apart from other rappers, and he likes to add style and influences from his
art-student background into the artwork.
Graduation features art by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami --
once Kanye had visited Murakami's studio in 2006 he decided the "Japanese
Andy Warhol" was awesome and wanted to collaborate with him. Murakami said
that the design took weeks because working with Kanye was difficult -- his
ideas were always changing. The cover continues on with the scholarly theme,
and as Murakami said, "It's a place of dreams, of righteousness, a place
to have fun. It's also occasionally a place where you experience the rigid
dogma of the human race." This relates to Kanye's music, as Murakami goes
on to say, "Kanye's music scrapes sentimentality and aggressiveness
together like sandpaper." The cover art was designed to represent this mix
of ideas related to school and life and connect it all together to Kanye's
music.
From then on, Dropout Bear disappears from the album covers, which
I think is kind of sad. So I'm going to skip ahead to the design of Kanye's
sixth album, Yeezus, which
is pretty much as minimalistic as you can get.
Kanye liked the idea of the simplicity of the design representing
the minimalism of the music on the album. He also said he wanted the music to
be what people focused on. Personally, I really appreciate the choice of adding
red tape to be the sole decoration to the album.
Yeezus, like The Life
of Pablo, offers ways for people to get involved in the design. On yeezygraffiti.com,
Kanye fans add their own concepts of Yeezus art. The image of the album with
the caption "Please add graffiti" was also spotted on the streets of
New York City, encouraging people to add their own drawings to the album signs.
So it turns out quite a bit of thought goes on behind the designs
of Kanye's albums, and several different artists and styles are represented.
It's interesting to watch how Kanye uses album art as a way to set himself
apart from other rap artists and create trends. I have to say, researching
Kanye's album covers was a much more enlightening experience than I thought it
would turn out to be.
