Meanings behind Kanye West's album covers

Picture: Refinery29

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.

Picture: Digital Spy

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. 

Picture: Digital Spy

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 16^th 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.

Picture: DJ Booth

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. 

Picture: Complex

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.

Picture: MTV

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.

Picture: Complex

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.