Year: 2013

Who designed it? Philadelphia artist Steve Powers painted a mural for Vile’s fifth album. The mural was defaced in 2014 by a resident who thought it was attracting too much graffiti to the area. The resident, DJ Lee Mayjahs, immediately regretted their decision. He wrote to Vile saying: “Unfortunately, in my mind, I have felt that that your tags on the wall there have attracted other painters to that area and the amount of graffiti we have had to deal with since then has increased tenfold… Today I lost it and went and painted over them… I became a vandal again myself. I became what I despise… I realized that having that work painted was the culmination of a dream for you. And I just destroyed that dream, I am so sorry.”

They say Powers: “When we first painted the wall, we left the tags that were already on the wall when we started. I thought they were kids from the neighborhood and I wanted to leave them up and make them part of the design. I painted the lower half of the wall as fast and as fun as I could, with the same joy as I painted graffiti when I was 17 and free as I will ever be.”

