In Kendrick’s scene, he’d just returned from a world tour and was performing a small show in Compton. As he performs “i” onstage, this time with live drums and backup singers, a fight breaks out in the audience, causing Kendrick to halt the song halfway through. Where Brown was trying to soothe the loss of a global leader, Kendrick kept it local, tempering a crowd presumably divided over gang colors and city blocks. He was also concerned with loss—the loss of his friends in the community. “How many niggas we done lost, bro?” Kendrick asks off mic. “This year alone! We ain’t got time to waste, my nigga!” If the rapper wanted Butterfly to heal his community and black people throughout the world, the speech and spoken-word freestyle given here crystallizes that theme. As he unpacks the speech, the fight slowly dissipates and the patrons hang on Kendrick’s every word: “N-E-G-U-S description: black emperor, king, ruler, now let me finish / The history books overlook the word and hide it / America tried to make it to a house divided.”
Kendrick was trying to flip the narrative surrounding the N-word while refuting the notion that people in the inner city are destined to fail. Though Kendrick’s friends hadn’t yet seen the world, To Pimp a Butterfly allowed the rapper to bring the world back to them. He was letting them know it wasn’t too late to change the tale, but he was also telling the public that his people weren’t just “thugs” and “gangsters” with no redeeming qualities. They were not trash; they simply hadn’t been given the same chances to succeed that their white counterparts had. So the fact that they gangbanged was a direct result of their living in a country where blacks were seen as inferior. By and large, they were not afforded the best education and told of their true royal lineage. They were not N-words (with the hard -er), they were Negus—supreme rulers, black kings and queens, who were simply far away from home, their true home, Africa. Kendrick discovered this during his journey and, ultimately, To Pimp a Butterfly was a therapeutic release.
That was most evident at the end of the album. After the notes fade on “Mortal Man” and Kendrick finishes the poem he’d been unpacking the entire LP, he starts talking to someone off mic. It’s his hero Tupac Shakur, not the actual Tupac, of course—he’d been dead almost nineteen years—but a repurposed version of him. The music journalist Mats Nileskär had conducted a chat with Tupac in 1994 and shared the audio with TDE for their own usage. Here, the conversation is edited to make it seem like Kendrick and Pac are in the same room. For those who’d listened to the full album, the inclusion of an unheard Tupac interview was a shock. Listeners weren’t expecting to hear his voice, and to hear it come out of nowhere—at the end of such a transcendent record—was truly a jaw-dropping moment. Yet this wasn’t just a chat for shock value; Kendrick had finally come back home—back to L.A., back to the one person who could understand his emotional plight. Tupac was also a Gemini, so he could too fathom the struggle of feeling like two different people, and struggling through growing pains in the public eye. Kendrick sought advice on how to deal with being rich, and how to stay prudent as a famous person. How did Tupac do it? “By my faith in God, by my faith in the game,” he told Kendrick, “and by my faith in ‘all good things come to those who stay true.’ ”
7
“We Gon’ Be Alright”
Midway through To Pimp a Butterfly is a song that would become the anthem for protests throughout the country, although Kendrick and Sounwave had no idea the track would hit in such a manner. It was called “Alright,” the beat for it composed by Pharrell Williams, the revered Grammy Award–winning producer whose credits include everyone from Justin Timberlake to Beyoncé. He had made the beat as his own version of “trap music,” the popular blend of trunk-thumping bass drums and street raps that became the most popular subgenre of hip-hop in the 2010s. Pharrell said he wanted something that sounded like trap, yet more “colorful,” like the music he’d been known to create as one-third of N.E.R.D. in the late nineties and as a solo artist. He wanted the beat for “Alright” to have the hard knock of a trap song, but with live instruments to give it a soulful essence. “I kind of had my Tribe Called Quest hat on that day,” Pharrell once said in 2015. He’d already worked with Kendrick, producing and singing backup on “good kid” from good kid, m.A.A.d city. Before then, Pharrell and his assistant played one of Kendrick’s mixtapes during a drive through Tokyo. That’s when he knew that Kendrick was a singular talent and wanted to work with him one day.
“Alright” as we know it almost didn’t happen. “That beat… I don’t think Pharrell was even going to play it for us, but one of his close friends, [who is also one] of our close friends who set up the session, was like, ‘Pharrell, you gotta play them that beat,’ ” Sounwave once told Spin. “And he played it for Kendrick, and it was there, but it was not all there, vibe-wise, so that was my job to layer in the drums, get Terrace [Martin] to throw some sax riffs on it, and make it us. It’s a completely different song than the original.… You’d understand if you were able to compare them, but that’s probably never gonna happen. You just have to have your ears open for every little sound that has potential.” The instrumental was infectious, from the stuttering vocal loop announcing its arrival, to the light synth chords bathing the track in bright
