Ms. Mural

"Ms. Mural" is a song by Lupe Fiasco, released as the sixth track from his eighth studio album, Drill Music in Zion (2022). It completes the Mural trilogy over the span of eight years, preceded by "Mural" (Tetsuo & Youth) in 2015 and "Mural Jr." (Drogas Wave) in 2018."Lupe Fiasco (@LupeFiasco)". Twitter. August 11, 2021. The track uses the analogy of a painter and its patron to Fiasco's own experience with Atlantic Records, audiences, and critics alike. In the end, the painter sets their studio on fire.
Fiasco noted in an interview that "Ms. Mural" expresses the suffering an artist puts into their work.Thompson, Paul (August 2, 2022). ""Rappers Don't Fall Off": Lupe Fiasco on Aging in Hip-Hop, Drill Music, and the Audience". The Ringer.
== Background ==
He told The Ringer in consideration of his patrons, "there's a lot of micro forces and macro forces at play, so it'd be a disservice to even categorize [...] All of those forces." He acknowledged that the track has multiple layers to it, which allows audiences to speak to or interpret its wide-range complexity:
Sometimes the audience becomes the painter in that piece, because they destroyed it all. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. You make one mistake, and they're throwing out—not just the painting, the whole fucking studio. Your career is over. That happened to me. So in some cases, it's both—again, back to that duality, you can't isolate these things. We have to talk about them isolated, as a teaching tool, but at the end of the day, these things are the same. You could picture [the characters in] 'MS. MURAL' as one person, talking to himself. Setting himself on fire, as some kind of postmodern, Vietnamese, flaming Buddha-type protest against all the shit that he or she has to go through.So the nuances are there if you choose to dive into them, and hopefully people do. But it's not about pointing the finger—it's about holding it in your hand, if that analogy makes more sense. It's about it being visceral, and about being honest with folks like, 'Yo... this shit kinda sucks.' Just like your job sucks, just like this person's job sucks. The job that they love! But Tuesdays and Wednesdays? It fucking sucks. Because that's inventory day. I want to be showing people new styles, I don't want to be in the back counting shoestrings. But you've gotta do that if you wanna do the other side of it.
Fiasco added that even though the album took him three days, it took him twenty years to finally be able to get to that point. He shared, "And 90 percent of that 20 years was suffering. From physical suffering—literally, I've got a herniated disc in my back, I've got sciatica, and it hurts to perform—to financial suffering, to mental suffering, to intellectual suffering, to beating yourself up because you don't think you're good enough, to getting beat up because people think you're too good, even though you're thinking [to yourself], like, 'I suck.' There's a lot of suffering that goes into the art, and I wanted 'MS. MURAL' to represent that suffering. At the very least, here's an artist dealing with all of these different layers and complexities—and at the end of his diatribe, all that the patron says is what? 'Wow.'"
== Lyrics ==
== References ==
Category:2022 songs
Category:Drill Music in Zion
Category:Explicit songs
Category:Lupe Fiasco songs
Category:Songs