Photo Credit: XXL
At least two murals featuring Kendrick Lamar have been vandalized in the Compton area.
Two murals featuring rapper Kendrick Lamar have been vandalized in the Compton area, at least one of which inspired his song “wacced out murals” from his latest album GNX, which he released last month.
One mural, painted by artist Mike Norice on the side of Tam’s Burgers — the restaurant featured in his “Not Like Us” music video — was defaced last month. Another mural, painted by Sloe Motion and Gustavo Zemeño Jr. earlier this summer on the back of Honduran restaurant Mi Sabor, has been defaced multiple times.
“Yesterday, somebody whacked out my mural / That energy’ll make you n—as move to Europe,” read the first lines of Ken’s intro track from his latest album. The song offered some solace for the artists of the Mi Sabor mural, who shared an Instagram Reel featuring security footage of a vandal defacing the mural.
“A couple months ago our Kendrick mural got hit. Of course we were pissed and wanted to fix it but it just kept getting worse,” they wrote in the caption. “Flash forward to today and Kendrick drops a song about the situation. It doesn’t necessarily make it okay but it does feel good to have our hard work for the community immortalized in a song by one of the greatest to ever do it. Thank you @kendricklamar for making this situation a little better today.”
It’s unknown if the vandals were inspired by the ongoing and very public beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, the latter of whom recently filed a lawsuit against UMG for their role in the release of Lamar’s Drake diss track, “Not Like Us.”
Mexican mariachi singer Deyra Barrera, who provides the vocals in Spanish at the beginning of “wacced out murals,” recently spoke to Billboard about her involvement in the album.
“I don’t know if you know a little bit about what happened when [Norice] did that painting, that it was scratched, vandalized, from Kendrick’s previous album, and because of that, Kendrick made the song ‘wacced out murals,’ the first song of the album where I appear,” said Barrera, explaining she was also recently invited to feature in an upcoming episode of Norice’s YouTube series, Art & Soul, to discuss the mural.
“Then the artist invited me to be there. It was something very nice, because somehow we connected and we have that in common. There’s a documentary coming out of the artist who made that painting, so soon it’s going to come out. Very cool to be there, because we both, in some way, have that in common with Kendrick.”