To promote its 2005 Hip Hop Honors awards special, VH1 commissioned us to produce seven spots featuring some of the genre’s most influential artists and evoking their contributions to world culture. In each spot, Nas appears in a white environment representing a different world capital and uses an ornate staff to send a golden vein coursing around the portraits and through the space in a symbolic reference to hip hop’s global reach. Each ad also features a huge portrait by New York-based painter Kehinde Wiley, depicting legends such as Notorious B.I.G., Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, L.L. Cool J, Ice-T, Salt-N-Pepa and Big Daddy Kane.

All the ingredients were already there for us to completely avoid any hip hop cliches: Kehinde’s paintings seem to be the modern day equivalent of Renaissance portraiture, the golden vine is a rather ancient metaphor, and the cosmopolitan outlook is also not something usually seen. Thanks to those ideas, we were able to create a fresh white visual language that seems like hip hop heaven.