I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

The single's cover featured Basquiat's artwork making the pressing highly desirable among both record and art collectors. He was a successful artist in this period but his growing heroin addiction began to interfere with his personal relationships. On February 10 1985 he appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist".

He began as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s. Utilizing social commentary as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual" Basquiat's paintings also attacked power structures and systems of racism while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.