Street Artist ‘Hanksy’ Mashes Up Ebola and Rapper Eazy-E

New York City-based street artist Hanksy poked fun at Ebola and rapper Eazy-E with a new street art mashup that he posted to his Instagram page on Tuesday.

Posted with the caption “Straight Outta Congo,” a play on the NWA hit “Straight Outta Compton,”  the artwork depicts the late rapper, who died of AIDS in 1995, in the form of a strain of the Ebola virus, holding two guns next to a bottle of prescription pills. Hanksy calls his piece “Eazy-E Bola.”

According to ANIMAL New York, the art was pasted on the corner of Division and Canal Streets in Chinatown.

“Don’t get me wrong, Ebola is like hella serious omg,” the artist told ANIMAL. “But American media just loves to sensationalize things. Like when the knockout game was super hyped, I had my mom calling me from the Midwest dust bowl telling me to ‘be on the lookout’ because she heard everyone was getting sucker punched in NYC. Then again, I was in Texas last week and came down with a pretty nasty cough. Maybe I should get myself checked out.”

The ANIMAL piece correctly points out that the artist’s caption doesn’t really make sense, because the Congo isn’t located in West Africa, the region that Ebola originated in. 

Still, as Complex notes, that hasn’t deterred commenters on Hanksy’s Instagram page from adding their own disease/artist mashup ideas, including “Cancer Mix-a-lot” and “Kanye West Nile Virus.”