The nonchalance in his eyes framed by his signature face piece, the thick shadow cast from his upper body to just below his nose – but seeps subtly underneath the mask and somehow his eyes still manage to slightly remain visible, all these elements make the Madonna inspired artwork one that could never fade from memory. The Jeff Jank designed and Eric Coleman photographed artwork didn’t communicate nothing more than simply, “this is MF DOOM”, and I really appreciated that, because Doom is a gentleman with a mask on, who is he? Who is under that mask? So in a way it was very paradoxical to have a masked man in such a striking composition, but I loved it. Success.Ĭontroversy aside, the MBDTF cover art was beautiful to look at, the use of a flat red and the minimalist layout, with the illustration contained by a gold/mustard outline, almost as if it contained that beautiful dark twisted fantasy inside, I appreciated that, but you won’t truly understand until you’ve unpackaged the actual hard copy and understood that the designer(s) were actually a bunch of show offs.īefore actually lending the album an ear fairly recently, the cover art had already found a special place in my heart. The cover art was banned because it was controversial, making it a brilliant design piece because it was successful in it’s function, Kanye West wanted something controversial, he was well aware of what that entailed, and he got exactly what he wanted, mission accomplished, sentence served. I read somewhere that the function Kanye imagined for this artwork was to spark controversy, a cover art so crass that it would be banned, and banned it was, in the US which prompted several variations of the cover art, I’m sure some of you have seen the one with a headless, crowned, stabbed Ye, or the one with the ballerina, and a pixelated version of the original. West enlisted contemporary visual artist, George Condo to design the controversial twisted fantasy visual. Out of all the lists I’ve seen Kanye’s name appear on, despite not having physically designed this piece, he’s one of the few artists who deserves to be on this list the most. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantas I found myself genuinely caring about something Frank Casino released the other day because he cares about the visual representation, he cared about what I care about and I appreciated it, so with that said, I have a list below of music releases I cared about more because they care about cover art, and not just the design, but the function of it, because functionality > beauty. Very few artists understand or value cover art for anything more than just having their younger brother’s friend play on ‘photoshop’ and crap out some cover art, particularly down here in SA Hip Hop, it’s sad.
#Madvillainy album art how to#
These are questions I often ask myself when I’m not thinking of how to get my music out there without compromising my art.
How is it almost so easy for us to identify the genre of a music compilation or album on the shelf in a music store, by simply looking at the cover art? What ties everything in? What are these elements? Who pioneered this style? What was their train of thought like? Were they both designer and musician or separate entities? The conversion process from audio to visual, what exactly happens between point A and point B? What goes through the mind of the designer? What has influenced his or her decision? What existing ideas influenced such a decision? What visual motifs have been established in each particular genre of music, that have formed part of the identity of a genre? The relationship between music and cover art work intrigues me a lot. Take music for example, how we are able to understand the mood, the atmosphere, aura and ambience of a particular song, the phenomenon exists in our ability to then translate what we hear and feel into something we can see and feel, through modes such as album/cover art work, music videos and short films. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon, how an enormous amount of the things we know, or think we know, are understood through cross-referencing between our 5 senses, smell, taste, hearing, sight and feel, and also via our own imagination.