Illustrations

There’s a hidden message behind some of my pictures that many may never catch onto. I usually do it to amuse myself or to get past an issue that’s bothering me. In this picture I took another shot at someone whose name I’ll leave anonymous. He was once a very good friend of mine and he went by the nickname of my Cousin Vinny. Our friendship ended on pretty bad terms and one night, things lead to him punching me in the face. He then tried to swing on the person I was with and that’s when it all had gone too far. Vinny’s head had gotten beat against a bumper and when he came to, he didn’t know what hit him. The cops came and didn’t know who to arrest, so they put me and one of Vinny’s friends in the truck. The whole time that we were in back of the truck, his friend cried about not being involved. So the cops asked a witness and she vouched for him, they concluded in letting him go. I ended up with a lump on my nose, a night in jail and a court fine to pay. This is what lead me to making this picture… the fact that I didn’t get to hit anyone. I had paid the price for a fight I didn’t start and by the end of the night, I was I wishing I did.

The picture shows Vinny being attacked by multiple people, which is what it looked like when my friend got to him. I portrayed them as cops because police brutality has always been a prominent topic. It was an easy disguise for the real story at hand and it also shows truth to them being present. My friend’s company logo is only on one of the cop’s uniforms… this represents the one-on-one that he and Vinny had. The cop who’s chasing the other figure above represents Vinny’s friend in the back of the truck crying. As for me and myself, I ended this fight on the cover of the very first Frank Magazine.

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I often hear my rap friends complain about not being featured in the areas they should. Be it a show or a tour or on certain radio stations, their main concerns & issues are that they’re not being supported. In Massinfluence‘s case with Elemental Magazine, I remember asking myself the exact same thing. We were doing a lot for the Atlanta underground and Elemental was a product from that scene’s environment. In further to add, the origin of their name was adopted from our label imprint Elemental Recordings.

About 12 issues had been released without a mention of the group… I began to think that they didn’t like who we were. But then one night at the MJQ Concourse, I ran into both of the owners, Adam and Matt Wright. I started to introduce myself and before I could finish, Matt said, “I know who you are.” So I asked why my group hadn’t been featured in his mag and he responded with, “we thought Massinfluence didn’t like us.” To make a long story short, we all looked at each other… and made sure that something like this would never happened again.

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Live From Mitchell Street was the name of Massinfluence‘s first album before we changed it to The Underground Science. We were gonna use this image as a sticker to place on the cover of our record jackets. This was before we started touring overseas and before we linked up with The Boulevard Connection. We were thinking of a cost effective means to have stickers and also add flavor to the cover of our album. In this picture, we plugged all of the groups and labels we worked with. We were even gonna have a contest to see who could point them all out first. In the end we used it as a “coming soon” ad in which we placed in select magazines.

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