Kendrick Lamar is getting ever closer to the release date of his highly-anticipated major label debut, Good Kid, m.A.A.d city. The official album art for the project was recently released online, and Lamar explained the significance of the artwork, which depicts him as a small child sitting at a table with his uncles and grandfather, in a new interview with Fuse.
"Two of my uncles, that's two of them, to the far right, that's my grandpa and a baby bottle next to a 40-ounce next to a gang sign, holding a kid," he said. "It's not just music to me. This is a story about the youth and the people that they call delinquents in my city. You look in the background and you see a picture on the wall of me and my pops... that photo just says so much about my life and how I was raised in Compton and the things I've seen through innocent eyes. You don't see no one else's eyes, but you see my eyes of innocence and trying to figure out what's going on."
The album is subtitled "A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar" and the Black Hippie ringleader emphasized that the entire project is meant to tell a story about his journey.
"It's really just a self-portrait. I feel I need this album in order to move on with my life, and I had negative vibes and demons haunting me," he said. "I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place. I went and put this message out in order for me to grow as a person. I'm glad I did, because it was a venting process to tell these stories I've never told."
Good Kid, m.A.A.d. city is slated to hit stores October 22 on TDE/Aftermath/Interscope. In the run up to the release, Lamar is currently headlining the first BET Music Matters hip hop tour.

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(Photo: Interscope Records)