The first thing you notice is the van. Burgundy, boxy, a 1990s Chrysler-style minivan parked at the curb on a street of single-story houses, its body curved at the edges by a fisheye lens that makes the whole block bulge like a memory you can't quite flatten out. The asphalt is cracked and sun-bleached. The sky above is a flat, cloudless blue, almost too clean for the worn pavement below. The whole picture sits inside a creased white Polaroid border, scratched and folded as if it has lived in someone's pocket for years.
This is the deluxe face of good kid, m.A.A.d city, and the van is no prop: it is Kendrick Lamar's mother's van, parked in front of the family home. For the deluxe gatefold he laid out ten Polaroids in a sequence he chose himself, a strip of childhood frames that turn an album into a photo album.
The standard cover is the one that stops people cold, and you can feel its absence here. It is a genuine childhood snapshot: a toddler Kendrick perched on the lap of one of his uncles, with two uncles and his grandfather gathered around a kitchen table. The adults' eyes are blacked out, censored bars across every grown face, while baby Kendrick's eyes stare back at you, wide and uncovered. He said the bars were there for personal reasons he would explain across the record itself.
Look at what sits on that table and the album's title starts to make terrible sense. A 40-ounce bottle of liquor stands next to a baby bottle. One uncle throws up a gang sign. On the wall behind them hangs a photograph of Kendrick and his father. Lamar narrated it plainly: a baby bottle next to a 40 next to a gang sign, holding a kid. AIGA Eye on Design compared the layered symbolism to Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where ruin hides in plain sight among the everyday objects.
Lamar called the image 'really just like a self-portrait.' Not a posed one, not a styled one, but the room he was raised in, Compton seen, as he put it, through innocent eyes. He said he needed to make the album to move on, that recording it was a venting process to tell stories he had never told. Marcus J. Moore's biography The Butterfly Effect confirms the figures: Lamar as a baby with two teenage uncles and his grandfather seated to his left.
Scrawled across the bottom of the van cover in loose, hand-drawn graffiti letters is the title, lowercase and uneven, with the subtitle billing the project as 'A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar.' To the right sits the small black-and-white Parental Advisory box. The handwriting refuses polish on purpose; it reads like something tagged on a wall rather than typeset by a designer, matching the homemade Polaroid framing.
Out on October 22, 2012, through Interscope, Top Dawg Entertainment and Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment, this conscious hip-hop record met wide acclaim and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, moving 242,000 copies in its first week. The cover's quiet genius is that it never dramatizes any of it. A parked van, a cracked street, a bright sky, a creased white border: the everyday scenery of one childhood, offered up as evidence. The family Polaroid says the same thing more bluntly, with its blacked-out eyes and its bottle beside a bottle. Both ask you to look at an ordinary frame and see the whole story folded inside it.
