I decided to do the design assignment where I make a lyric typography poster.

Last week, I ran across the brilliant K. Flay and especially fell in love with “The Cops.”

My brain, now hardwired to relate things to The Wire, instantly thought of Omar and Brandon. I found their relationship to be really interesting, as gay gangsters isn’t something that’s present in television or movies. Likewise, the fact that Omar was the “man” in the relationship and Brandon was the “woman” in the relationship seemed to work with the idea of this song. I think Brandon’s death goes along well with the song’s idea of protecting those who are dangerous, even if they may deserve to be arrested or investigated by the cops. By sticking by Omar, Brandon was killed, and now he’ll never be able to talk about what went on.

Inspired by the meshing of these two ideas, I created this poster, which features some of the lyrics from the chorus:

 

At first, I was unsure how I should go about creating this, so I looking through some of the posts from students who had previously completed this assignment. In this blog, I found out about PicMonkey, which is what I ended up using. It was pretty easy to use, and I was glad to see that I could just save the image I created to my desktop when I was done.

I changed the fonts of the words that really stood out to me: “wreck,” “waste,” “baby,” and “cops.” I think each font I chose further emphasizes the tone or meaning in the words. I also changed the final line to a font that looks more handwritten.

I chose a lighter yellow for the background color, because I wanted to hint back to the scene where Brandon’s body is found, so I found a screen shot of it from Paul Bond’s post about subliminal messages. The hood of the car is yellow, so I decided to make the background of this poster be of a similar shade.

I decided to put a lipstick kiss behind the final line because it emphasized the conflict of whether to talk or not. I think it can also be interpreted as nods to the phrase “the kiss of death” or to the fact that Brandon is a very feminized character because of the heteronormative approach people take to understanding homosexual couples.

Just as the lyrics of the song are romantic on the surface, but bear a dangerous truth beneath, so does the relationship between Brandon and Omar. Brandon’s death was not because Brandon personally did something wrong to Barksdale’s crew. He was tortured and killed because they knew he was Omar’s lover, and they wanted to get revenge on Omar.