Kanye West: God & Monster by Mark Beaumont

Author:Mark Beaumont [Beaumont, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78323-394-6
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2015-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Pow! Eyes to the sky and chain flying, the Dropout Bear cannoned out of the gaping mouth of a monster resembling an entire university campus come to life, with joyous animal graduates waving him off. After two album covers reflecting a dark and dour attitude towards college life, it was a bright cartoon introduction to Graduation, a sign of Kanye taking off into a hyper-coloured future.

The sleeve was designed by Takashi Murakami, known as Japan’s own Andy Warhol for his post-modern superflat images of cute cartoonish animals with wicked undertones. Kanye had met Murakami during a trip to his Kaikai Kiki studio in Tokyo while on tour for Late Registration and loved his twist on his beloved anime style. During the design process Kanye would come up with a storyline for the Dropout Bear’s cartoon adventures and email them to Murakami to bring them to life: the bear waking up late for his graduation from the University Of Universe City, finding his DeLorean hover car failing on him and taxis and buses leaving him stranded, having to race down rainy streets watched by many-eyed mushrooms and chased by a cloud with monster teeth and finally reaching his graduation ceremony, only to be shot into the stratosphere by his animal classmates.

“[Murakami’s] work has been stunning to me because pop art is really expressive, representative and emotional, and it looks like something you can do yourself,” Kanye said. “[But] you cannot do no Murakami shit yourself. You cannot do this at home. He has this studio out in Japan that has 30 artists working at one time. I love Japanese culture and I was always into art, and Murakami is really a god in the art world … I’ve heard people come up to him and say, ‘You’re becoming more godlike every day’. Every single that’s coming out for my album, he did the artwork for the covers…. And all the merchandising for the new album is Murakami.”

“The cover is based on Kanye’s theme of student life,” Murakami explained. “School. 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. Kanye’s music scrapes sentimentality and aggressiveness together like sandpaper, and he uses his grooves to unleash this tornado that spins with the zeitgeist of the times. I too wanted to be swept up and spun around in that tornado.”

Just as the bear was simultaneously stressed and triumphant, so the album seemed to catalogue Kanye’s own existential dualities. Here was an album that ricocheted between arrogance and doubt, aggrandisement and self-criticism, a talent deeply analysing itself to the tune of its latest giant leap.

Although it was never released as a single, Murakami animated his Dropout Bear cartoons for a video to accompany the album’s first track, ‘Good Morning’, a heady, slow-paced song that wafted by like a daydream, weaving samples from Jay-Z’s ‘The Ruler’s Back’ and Elton John’s ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ around a laid-back, insistent groove of cowbell, synth drone and enigmatic piano.

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