Ms. Mural

## Song by Lupe Fiasco

"**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. 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.

## 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

**Lyrics**
[Verse 1]

"If you had to paint the gutter, which color would you choose?"

Said the patron to the painter, the painter said, "The blues"

"Do you act off intuition or languish and peruse?"

"More like tap into tradition from the angle of my mood"

He looked back at his canvas while strangling a tube

A master of the palette, all sanguine and cool

The music mostly jazz, the jazz mostly old

Punctured by some punk and some old smoky soul

An atlas on the trunk from the land of broken goals

Just a cover and a back that you open and you close

"Where are all the pages?" The painter said, defanged

"I ripped 'em all out and made some paper planes

Fish grease absorbers and some origami cranes”

Poured hisself a drink and then poured it down the drain

Looked at the empty canvas, said "I think I have a name

I'll call it 'Gasoline Pouring on the Flames,'" hah, hah

[Instrumental Break]

[Verse 2]

"I appreciate the visit, this isn't normally allowed"

"Do you consider yourself wild or conforming to a style?"

The patron pointed at a pile, "Are those rejections or mistakes?"

The painter said, "That is not for question or debate

Most of what we know as art is the projection of a faith

The product of a Pontiff or the election of a saint

A gift from the read for the digestion of the can't

A visual garnish for the confessions of the frank

Displays of physical carnage make connections to the ranks

Goes over very well with South Americans and Yanks

Not to sound shamanistic, but there's medicine in paint

It gets kinetic if you let it, there's a fetish in its strength

Martyrdom will call, Russian roulette is in the flanks

And most would pull the trigger if the weapon's full of blanks

But when there's a pool of sharks and you step into the tank

That's the pool of art that got 'em headed to the plank

But they fell for the deceptiveness of the secularist's complaint

The upheaval of the cathedral into the edifice of bank

That pile over there is just the evidence of angst

The failed revival of a perfectionist when his efforts have just sank

A selection of the waste that lacks direction or a base

You lose all of the plots for the affections of a race

Man does not become superior 'cause you connect him to a cape

Nor does become inferior because you connect him to a ape

I never wanted my life to be a collection of some dates

And holiday my days away and intellectually sedate

It's not really a beef but conceptually it's steak

Like do genitals and gender roles successfully conflate?

The current art world is just competitively opaque

It never ceases to amaze, my mouth is medically agape

One day its raising up the brand, the next it's shredding it to flakes

And the velocity of trends is what referees the pace

Professionally accept what ethically I hate

So in all of my work, you see this wrestling with fate

Deceiving in the brushstrokes how aggressively I strafe

Less like putting on some makeup, more like severing a face"

"Wow," said the patron with a smile

"That's the most interesting diatribe I've heard in a while

How you articulated the nature and put it all on trial

Took it up to Heaven, then put it on the ground"

The painter asked the patron, "Can you stand up on the pile?

I've had a flash of inspiration, my creativeness aroused"

The model took its place, the painter grabbed a lighter

Doused the shit in gasoline and set it all on fire

[Outro]

We got through the hearts of stone

And the scars for bones

When your heart's unknown

In the arc of Joan, yeah

## References

1. ↑ "Lupe Fiasco (@LupeFiasco)". *Twitter*. August 11, 2021.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Thompson, Paul (August 2, 2022). ""Rappers Don't Fall Off": Lupe Fiasco on Aging in Hip-Hop, Drill Music, and the Audience". *The Ringer*.