The cover art for Bully, the next solo album by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, features an image taken by the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama.
On Wednesday, Ye posted a black-and-white image of a person’s grinning face to his Instagram account. The person’s teeth are covered in gem-encrusted grills, and the center ones are blacked out.
The Italian digital magazine Outpump said in an Instagram post that the image is a reference to the Japanese custom ohaguro, “a symbol before reaching adulthood and after marriage, as well as beauty.” The process involved women painting their teeth with a solution made “from iron filings mixed with vinegar and tannin from vegetables or tea,” according to the British Dental Journal.
Moriyama capturing changes in postwar Japan and the effects of modernization on the nation’s culture. He was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s acclaimed 1974 exhibition “New Japanese Photography,” and was the subject of a complete retrospective at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, in 2011. A solo exhibition followed in 2012 at Tate Modern in London.
In 2019, Moriyama won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, which came with a prize worth approximately $110,000 and a solo show of his work. Last year, at the age of 85, Moriyama had his first retrospective in the UK at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
Bully is Ye’s third album this year alone, following the release of the albums Vultures 1 and Vultures 2 in February and August, respectively. Ye teased the first Vultures album in January by posting a video trailer by artist Jon Rafman to X.
According to music journalist Toure, Ye has been living in Tokyo, where he recorded Bully in a hotel room with an engineer. On October 8, Tokyo Weekender reported that the rapper had been seen in the Japanese capital city without his wife for the past two weeks “at a Pro Wrestling Noah event in Shinjuku and in the Jamaican restaurant Good Wood Terrace in Shibuya.”
Bully isn’t the first time Ye has featured the work of a Japanese artist on an album. Takashi Murakami designed the cover for Ye’s 2007 album Graduation and Kids See Ghosts, the rapper’s collaboration with Kid Cudi from 2018.
