Nas Life is good: Case Study

The final case study for the CD cover and album art is Nas’s album: Life is good. The image on the front of the album is of a bored looking Nas sitting on a sofa wearing his wedding suit and his ex-wife’s (Kelis Rogers) wedding dress. The denotation of the image completely contradicts the name of the album, Life is good because the images  denotes a photo of Nas at was most likely the worst part of his life, when his wife left him. What the image connotes is that Nas has gotten over the divorce, thus meaning the name of the album is appropriate. However, this could just be a cheap shot at his ex-wife.

The layout of the cover has the photo with text in the top left and bottom centre of the cover. In the top left is Nas’s logo of his name and the bottom text is the album title written in what look like a hand written font, maybe to connote class and pushing forward the idea of the image connoting the more pleasant idea of Nas getting over his divorce. The back cover just has the track list with the featuring artists and the “Bonus Tracks” title in a similar font to that of the album title on the front cover.

 

The CD Image is of the Nas logo “N” with shapes similar to the underline on the front cover. The background of the CD image looks similar to concrete or of old dark grey paper.

The album art for Life is good has a similar effect that Kid Cudi’s: Man on the moon 2 has i.e. the old paper effect. As well as this, the photos have been edited so that photos are mainly black and white with some objects having colour. I think that this give extra influence to some object and allows everything else to fade into the background.

I have learned from analysing this case study is the technique of putting some photos in black and white and only allowing key props to be in colour. This technique will add more meaning to some props that would have been overlooked if the whole photo were in colour. Also just like the Kid Cudi case study I would like to use the old paper effect to go with the use of Bad TV in the music video.