Kendrick Lamar revealed the cover art for his highly anticipated debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city recently. The creative cover art featuring a childhood photo of Kendrick Lamar, with the deluxe edition featuring an old van in a suburban neighborhood.
In an interview with Fuse Kendrick explained why he chose to go with this for the art, as well as explaining where the inspiration for his album came from.
He says of his Aftermath debut, "It's really just like a self-portrait. I feel like I needed to make this album to move on with my life. I had them old negative vibes and demons haunting me, and it's that real." Kendrick continued, "It had to come from somewhere, had to come from a place, it coulda been negative and it coulda been positive, but for the majority part of it, it was a negative place." He says recording the album helped him move on, "It was a venting process, to tell these stories I never told."
Kendrick explains the photo as follows, "Two [of the men] are my uncles, to the far right, it's my grandpa, and a baby bottle, next to a 40 oz, next to a gang sign, holdin' a kid," K.Dot says of his cover art. "If you look in the background, you see a picture on the wall, and the picture is me and my pops," Kendrick added. "And the eyes blacked out, that's for my own personal reasons, you'll probably hear about that on the album. That photo says so much about my life, and about how I was raised in Compton, and the things I've seen, just through them innocent eyes. You don't see nobody else's eyes, but you see my eyes are innocent, and tryna figure out what is goin' on."
The LP is slated for release on October 22nd. Watch the interview with Fuse below.