Just look at Andre, and Antwan.Outkast at the Area: One music festival in 2001 If you felt like an OutKast - an outsider in your own city, like an ATLien - that cover (and comic book inside) showed fans that you can create what you want, and that really, you can be anyone. Their cover of ATLiens showed you they respected art, and that they respected creativity. Their “something to say” was them showing their real selves. “It was like, ‘Hey, let me add something, let’s cover his face a little bit … He always wears his hat like that anyways.’ ”īig Boi and Andre didn’t have to show their “real” faces. To him, it was mainly a solution to a problem, but that Braves hat further grounded the ATL in the ATLiens, a signaling to the world that OutKast hadn’t completely left this world. So Robinson suggested adding a hat, and sketched an Atlanta Braves cap to place on his head. One problem that pretty much everyone who saw the original inks agreed upon: That face didn’t look like Big Boi’s. They were superheroes, but they were still very much themselves. Big Boi was in his B-boy stance and Dre rocked a turban. Forget latex and unrealistic body frames. As hands of unseen monsters close in on them, Andre and Big Boi are superheroes as powerful and unwavering as Superman or Captain America, but - and this was and remains key - they looked dope. Gomez vivified their concept on the cover. Gomez works now as a character designer at Marvel Animation but back then, he was illustrating DC Comics titles such as the apocalyptic Superman: At Earth’s End (1995). The team sent out some OutKast photos and sketches to McFarlane - he turned them down, and passed them along to Frank Gomez. And before that meeting in Reid’s office, Andre had brought a stack of old Parliament records to Sawyer’s office, saying they should dip into the aesthetic of 1977’s Funkentelechy or 1976’s Clones of Dr. Both Sawyer and Robinson were reading a ton of Image Comics then, with a particular fondness for Spawn, and loving the bold artwork of Todd McFarlane. We read the comic books.” In the end, it was a massive collaborative effort that pushed the concept through. “Darrick was basically playing along with Dre and Big Boi saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, we need to do a comic book,’ but the idea came from me and Vince ,” said Nigel Sawyer, then the co-art director at LaFace. But two kids from the Art Institute of Atlanta had planted a different idea in OutKast’s heads. Most musical acts in the ’90s had their faces on their album covers. And comic books are basically like paper movies.” So Warfield suggested a cover that resembled a comic book. “ didn’t sound like a record,” Warfield said. Everyone lights up.įorget latex and unrealistic body frames. “ATLiens,” Big Boi and Andre both say, separately, of course, but somehow together. He’s now founder and president of the boutique agency Goldfinger C.S. Warfield, who, at the time, was creative director at LaFace. One of those present in the LaFace offices was D.L.
Outkast album cover how to#
At the 1995 Source Awards, they’d won Best New Rap Group and Andre galvanized an entire movement when he famously announced, “The South got somethin’ to say.” Now OutKast needed to say what that was.Īnd they did know how to command attention of a room. OutKast had cut themselves in as the Southern alternative to what was then a very bicoastal rap scene. This isn’t Big Boi of 2003’s “ The Way You Move” or Andre 3 Stacks of “ Hey Ya.” These are just two kids who made one nice album - 1994’s woozy and sprawling S outhernplayalisticadillacmuzik. “We finally got the album title.” One of them announced it. They enter LaFace co-founder Antonio “L.A.” Reid’s office. So here’s the scene: Andre and Big Boi exit the elevators at the top floor of Atlanta-based LaFace Records.