Kanye West’s Creative Director Virgil Abloh Breaks Down How ‘Yeezus’ Cover Symbolized Death of the CD
Kanye West‘s Yeezus album has one of the more memorable covers in recent years, thanks to its minimalist approach. Now, Kanye’s creative director, Virgil Abloh, says the cover was meant to symbolize the death of the CD.
On Monday (Feb. 6), Abloh gave a lecture to students at Columbia University. During the talk, the Chicago native breaks down how he and ‘Ye came up with the Yeezus cover and speaks about the blank CD’s hidden meaning.
“This piece here, often him and I both say, we kinda outdid ourselves in a way,” Abloh says in the clip, which can be viewed below. “We weren’t supposed to come up with something this clean. I don’t know what happened. We don’t know what it was but we both looked at it in the end and we were like, ‘Damn. It’s as if we went to design school.’”
He continues, “Did Dieter Rams come visit us in a dream, and we finally did something good? But it’s metaphorical … Think about the era in which this came out. Two hip-hop kids that are obsessed with design and progressing forward… But for us, it represented the death of a CD… It’s an open casket for a format of music we were raised off of that’ll never be seen. Like, what’s the orange sticker? What are the 30 versions of the orange sticker?”
Abloh also gives props to Kanye, and thanks him for their work together over the years, saying, “For an artist like Kanye West, that raised a generation based on art and music and being progressive, me having the ability to work on those projects was insane, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
You can check out the Columbia University lecture below via Twitter.
CLIP: @virgilabloh talks about #YEEZUS during a lecture at @ColumbiaGSAPP yesterday. pic.twitter.com/5nxB4d1cHt
— ㅤTKD MEDIA (@mediatkd) February 7, 2017
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