Takashi Murakami

« As far as art goes, this is no disrespect to Basquiat, but I’m just not into that style at all. When you see Murakami, it’s that “I can’t do that at home” type thing. I had seen the Louis Vuitton stuff he did, but then my man Don C. put me on to how important an artist he was. And Don C. was buying prints and different things already, so then I started looking at his work. I saw this statue that I loved, “Hiropon.” I was looking to buy the statue, and there’s only four of them in the world [Editor’s note: One sold in 2002 for $427,500]. Murakami has one, so I went to meet with him just so I could see the statue in person. After I met him, I said, “Man, why don’t we draw my Jesus piece together?” We were talking about doing something together and I was like, “Yo, why don’t we do the album packaging together?” And he said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Thank you.” Now we’ve been working on it for like a year and a half—he’s supposed to be animating the video for this song called “Good Morning.”»