Working with other creative cats is my pride and joy as an illustrator and designer. It has been a real pleasure putting together stellar album covers for some extraordinary hip-hop artists who are on the up and come up on the East Coast. If you don’t know who I speak of you simply have to check out The N.O.C from South Florida. It was an honor to put together their debut album layout for Dinosaur last spring and I recently had the satisfaction of putting together some fresh artwork for members K Sos and Rams 2010 mixtape release Murphy’s Killer.
No strangers to stirring the pot of political roughness and kicking raw flavor that amplifies the generation XYZ, it was a duo blast of urban rawness and shotgun imagery from both sides. K Sos and Rams are on the pinnacle of exploiting their freedom of expression and Murphy’s Killer is no exception. In an attempt to squash Murphy’s Law, the facetious proposition that if something can go wrong, it will, these two members of The N.O.C put the clutch down on excelling into a new era of keeping it genuine and representing the buzz of the American street aficionados.
To do justice and reflect the messages broadcast on MK the cover had to be montaged in a seamlessly compact way. Depicted on the cover are members K Sos and Rams who have drug Murphy to his last rights. Murphy is satirized as the obese, greedy, white-bred politician who has been captured and brutalized by the N.O.C crew. A shotgun to his head, stab wounds, and all his dirty money on the pavement, Murphy (Murphy’s Law) is over with.
To complete the full effect of the chaos to ensue I broke into my bank of imagery to montage a masterpiece of mayhem. Surrounded by police squads, cops with guns drawn, tattooed chicks, screaming fans, and flames bursting in the air the focus of the cover (the slaughtering of Murphy) is pushed into the foreground. Photos used in the background came from my trips across the continental USA. The graffiti building on the left originates in the Mission District of San Francisco, the city skyline of Chicago, a water tower from Alcatraz, parking lot in Seattle, deco building and club from Italy, and characters who have been digitally painted and enhanced all come together to form a surreal environment that is reminiscent of a frame from Grand Theft Auto.
Every detail from the ghetto birds (police helicopters) blasting spotlights all the way down to the cracks in the concrete all spin from the depths of my inner beast that roars “make this solid…down to the core”. The effect is an insane composition that keeps the viewer coming back and finding more pieces of gooey visual elements that rock the soul. Here’s to putting the kibosh on Murphy’s Law and the giants of the Southeast… N.O.C. 4 Life!
All Images © Nick Beery | All Rights Reserved | www.BEERYMETHOD.com