Words: Corey Scandon Visuals: Getty Images, Joseph Ross, SAIN+/Electric Halo NYC
A Cosmic Appointment: Joey A.X Named Creative Director for Funk Icon Bootsy Collins (RocNation/Bootzilla)
In early March of 2025, Creative Director Joey A.X was tapped to become the Creative Director for music legend, godfather of funk, & enigmatic Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame member (and the most sampled man in hiphop history) Bootsy Collins.
In a move equal parts daring, and divinely aligned, RocNation has officially named creative multi hyphenate Joey A.X as the new Creative Director for none other than the man whose bass lines built entire galaxies of groove.
For the uninitiated, this is akin to entrusting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling to a street artist blessed with celestial vision— and a ladder that reaches the stars.
Bootsy Collins, the bespectacled architect of peak-era funk and an eternal envoy of the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership, has never been an artist mired in the pedestrian. His aesthetic is as loud as it is legendary: sequined space suits, mirrored shades, and a star-shaped bass guitar that might as well double as a portal to alternate rhythmic dimensions. Collins has spent decades evading creative gravity, orbiting the outer edges of music and fashion with an ease that borders on gravitational defiance.
So, what does it mean to pair a cultural monolith with a modern visionary? Enter Joey A.X.
Known for his acerbic taste, cinematic visual instincts, and unapologetically punk ethos, A.X has carved a reputation as something of an enigma personally, and a contrarian in the creative. Equal parts provocateur and professor, his aesthetic touches read like footnotes to an unwritten thesis on pop culture disruption. His previous work with household name artists & brands and boundary-pushing new IP, talent & fashion suggests he views culture less as a sandbox and more as a fault line—ripe for shaking.
Appointing him to the helm of Bootsy’s visual and creative ship is not merely a matter of optics; it is an intergenerational handshake, signed in glitter and sealed with a wah pedal.
“Bootsy isn’t a musician—he’s an energy field,” A.X reportedly said in early internal meetings, where mood boards & decks included everything from 1970s archival footage to AI-generated visions of ‘Afrofuturist Versailles' called "Funktropolis" that would unleash the imagination of Collins on the public.
If that sounds high-concept, that’s because it is—and necessarily so. To craft a contemporary narrative around a man who long ago declared himself “the Funkadelic Minister of Funk” requires more than a creative director. It requires a cultural interpreter.
Billboard's headlining story the week of AOTY#1F \ Img. Cred: Joseph Ross
At RocNation, this partnership is already being positioned as a flagship model for legacy reinvention in the streaming era. Collin's own JV- Bootzilla Records, was always intended to be a far bigger idea than just an imprint. With catalog music outperforming new releases across platforms, the industry is increasingly focused not on what's new, but on who can be made new again.
A.X’s appointment is a tacit acknowledgment that nostalgia sells, but only when curated with the kind of precision and irreverence that Bootsy's mythology demands.
Plans are reportedly underway for a multi-sensory reintroduction of Bootsy Collins to Gen Z and their siblings—the streaming-savvy Millennials who know Bootsy more as a sampled ghost in hip-hop’s machine than as the corporeal funk, rock, jazz & rap juggernaut he remains.
Just one of the many press selections from April 2025 press, where everyone from Rolling Stone, to Forbes to The Fader (above) covered unique angles of Collin's latest work.
There are whispers (some loud, some artfully leaked by the likes of the hypebeast publisher circuit) of a VR/AR concert experience, high-fashion collaborations with rotating curations & capsules in various cities that is said to feel “like a Parliament record produced by Zedds Dead, translated by Carl Sagan, in a Dali-esque world thats shot by LaChappelle on Nan Golden's camera.”
Whether any of that comes to pass even this calendar year is almost beside the point. Last Friday's release of Collin's first complete 18 track masterpiece "Album Of The Year, #1 Funkateer" has already began climbing charts domestically & globally. It's received praise & banner waving from the likes of Rolling Stone, AfroPunk, Billboard Magazine & more- and features everyone from Snoop Dogg to Wiz Khalifa to 70's & 80's legends reunited.
One of the Collin's "Record Store Tour 2025" posters, where Collins & Co. drove across the US, hitting several historic record stores for immersive experiences revolving around the new album. Above is A.X's trademark "surrealism with a snarl" for Atlanta's Criminal Records.
The appointment of Joey A.X is itself the statement: that even icons—especially icons—require reinvention. Not through compromise, but through a renewed sense of visual and narrative clarity, one steeped in the same radical absurdity that made them icons to begin with.
Select previews of the new limited edition, IRL-Only capsule
Perhaps that is the most quietly subversive thing about this move. In a landscape addicted to algorithms and plagued by trend fatigue, RocNation and Team Bootsy Collins, lead by his wife & manager "Peppermint" Patti Collins & the industry heavyweight marketing collective Over The Line of Nashville have turned to someone who seems utterly disinterested in the ephemeral.
He's notorious for his dangerously obsessive method actor's approach to his work- equally as much as he is for his renegade spirit.
Joey A.X, it appears, is not chasing the moment. He’s reconstructing a myth.
Collin's record store tour poster selections, powered by RocNation & RatLab that had lines wrapped around four iconic record stores from Minneapolis to Nashville- with Vegas and LA slated for May.
"Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen, Cruz and the amazing people at OTL Nashville, Patti, Bootsy & the entire Collins family. This feels right on every level." Said A.X.
Collins once said, “Funk is the absence of any and everything you can think of, but the very presence of everything you can feel.” That, in fewer words, is what the 37 year old NYC metro native has been tasked with translating.
It’s not a job. It’s a cosmic mission.
