good kid, m.A.A.d city

Most cities give their best storytellers a key to the city after the fact. Compton gave Kendrick Lamar a city to write inside of, while he was still 16. The 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city is, more than almost any other piece of recorded music in the last two decades, a literal map. It can be walked. It still walks. The geographic spine of the record is twelve streets — Rosecrans, Alondra, Bullis, Atlantic, Long Beach Boulevard, Wilmington, Centennial, Greenleaf, Caldwell, Compton Boulevard, El Segundo, and the family house off Cleveland — and a handful of named intersections that any kid who grew up in this city in the 1990s and 2000s will recognize on first listen. The second song on the album, "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe," is set on a porch the listener has driven past. "M.A.A.D City" itself opens with a phone call about a shooting at a corner that, at time of writing, still has the same liquor store. "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" is set in a car stopped at a red light at Wilmington and Compton — and then walks the listener, in real time, through the four blocks west to the family driveway. What the album proves, twelve years after release and two years after its author won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a non-classical, non-jazz musician, is that the geography of an American city — even a city the rest of the country has spent forty years either ignoring or stereotyping — can hold a Pulitzer-winning piece of writing. The Museum's interpretation of the album is intentionally small. It is a map. A standing wall, four feet wide, that traces the twelve streets the album visits, with quotes pinned at the intersections where the songs occur. Visitors are encouraged to bring their headphones, to play the record while they read the wall, and to walk out of the museum and finish the listen on the street the song is set on. The map is not a tribute. It's the city the album already came from.