African-American Express

African-American Express (watercolour and acrylic on paper)

Greetings!! I'm back again to get it crackin' with a quick piece that came out of one of my classes last semester. Our assignment was to illustrate a lyric - I chose a part from Kanye's 'Last Call' from the album College Dropout, where he's talking about being at the mall blowing all his money and being approached by a girl asking about his credit card.

The song goes like (or click here to go listen to it, the lyric drops at 3:12):

Girl at the Mall: "Oh my God, is that a black card"

Kanye: I turned around and replied "Why yes, but I prefer the term African-American Express".

A black card is the highest limit American-Express credit card, available by invite only. I think this lyric is a succinct and interesting example of Ye's work to redefine the Black image in popular culture, and it spoke to me on a variety of levels. I chose to take a very literal approach in illustrating it because I thought the lyric itself had many layers of meaning, and I wanted to showcase the content already inherent. For the most part I was fairly happy with the execution on this piece, but the typography, which is usually not one of my weaknesses, fell apart a bit in a few places. I also took the opportunity to bump up the contrast a little digitally, which I think helped the overall impact. Thanks for coming thru, and shoutout to Yeezy for the fresh lyric!