The music video premiered on NPR on May 26th, 2015. As the director Nathan Smith stated, the concept of the video correlates with the flow of water:

We wanted to shoot something with a constant flow of motion to complement Mick’s unending verse. I created the idea of Mick walking through a scene of complete chaos, yet being unaffected by everything. To create that effect, I had Mick walk backwards from left to right through the entire scene as people pelted him with various items. That way, once we reversed the footage, Mick would look like the only person moving forward and everything would lift off of his body, leaving the chaos behind. Everything in the shot — the fire, water, even the train — was in-camera. We did no VFX whatsoever, and the actual shot only took 15 seconds to film at 240 frames per second, or 10 times slower than real-time. At the end of the video, the water bottle that floats into Mick’s hand symbolizes that his words and lyrics hold the truth amongst all the other nonsense people are exposed to.

Coming from Compton, Kendrick has seen his fair share of murders, whether it be gang related or police brutality. As Kendrick said to Rolling Stone:

He saw his first murder at age five, a teenage drug dealer gunned down outside Lamar’s apartment building. “After that,” he says, “you just get numb to it.”

Chad Keaton, one of Kendrick’s best friends whom Kendrick called his “little bro,” also died in 2013, which Kendrick references in Fredo Santana’s “Jealous”. This is also strikingly similar to the story of Dave and his brother on “Sing About Me”. Dave was shot after fighting with people who roughed up Kendrick, and his brother says:

You ran outside when you heard my brother cry for help
Held him like a newborn baby and made him feel
Like everything was alright and a fight he tried to put up
But the type of bullet that stuck had went against his will