The story behind 2Pac’s haunting ‘The 7 Day Theory’ cover: “I give Suge all the credit”
2Pac’s career was a short but extremely impactful one, and his music is still relevant to this day. The late legend was a revolutionary, and his socially conscious, anti-establishment material energised the culture. However, one of his most beloved projects was the posthumously released Makaveli album, also known as The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.
The album was distinct in several ways. Unlike many of his previous bodies of work, 2Pac’s 7 Day Theory was recorded and mixed in less than a month and released under the moniker Makaveli due to his admiration for the political ideologies expressed in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Another difference between Makaveli and 2Pac’s previous albums is that no photo of him was featured on the front of the project. Instead, Compton native Ronald “Riskie” Brent designed a haunting and eerie image of 2Pac nailed to a cross for a crucifixion.
Brent was only 24 when he drew the design for the album cover and was plucked from relative obscurity by Death Row CEO Suge Knight, who recruited Brent as one of the label’s in-house artists. That said, in an interview with Crack magazine, the artist spoke about the story behind the haunting illustration.
Brent unveiled that he got his start as a graffiti artist and was spotted by Suge Knight, disclosing, “I did graffiti and started airbrushing t-shirts at the Compton Swat Meet and people would pay me well to do their clothes. I developed a buzz around the city and it must have got Suge Knight’s attention.”
He continued, “I give Suge all the credit as he literally plucked me out of the streets and gave me a position at the biggest hip-hop label in the country. You gotta remember that nearly every member of the staff at Death Row was someone plucked from the ghetto! It was the very definition of a black-owned label; he gave opportunities to people who had nothing!”
The graffiti artist unveiled that he showed Suge Knight some of his 2Pac illustrations and that when the rapper himself saw them, he asked him to draw some “cartoons for the All Eyez On Me liner notes.” Concerning his involvement with the label, Brent told Crack, “I literally started as an in-house artist on Death Row the day Snoop Dogg got acquitted for murder [in 1993].”
When the topic of conversation turned to The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, Brent spoke about how 2Pac inspired the final image, stating, “Being in the studio with Tupac, he would speak a lot about feeling like he was being crucified by the media and being blamed for things that he didn’t have any control over. The concept [for the artwork] was all his, with the different cities on the cross showing he was the most hated wherever he would go.”
He concluded, “His crucifixion was supposed to be a statement about race and what it felt like to be young, rich and black in America. The 7 Day Theory was originally going to be this underground album; Pac predicted the rise of mixtapes and was only going to sell it only at the mom-and-pop stores. It only turned into a commercial album after he died.”