Kendrick sat on the instrumental for six months before he knew what to say on it. The track sounds joyous, like it should be a party record. But because the album’s theme was so serious, the rapper saw something dark within the track, something that called for unifying words. “I knew it was a great record—I just was trying to find the space to approach it,” Kendrick told producer Rick Rubin for a GQ feature in 2015. “I mean, the beat sounds fun, but there’s something else inside of them chords that Pharrell put down that feels like—it can be more of a statement rather than a tune. Eventually, I found the right words.… And I wanted to approach it as more uplifting—but aggressive. Not playing the victim, but still having that We strong, you know?” Kendrick said he faced pressure from Pharrell and Sam Taylor, a professional dot-connector in the music industry, to write something monumental, or at least finish the damn thing. “I didn’t have any words,” Kendrick continued. “P knew that that record was special. Sam knew that the record was special. They probably knew it before I even had a clue. So I’m glad that they put that pressure on me to challenge myself. ’Cause sometimes, as a writer, you can have that writer’s block. And when you like a sound or an instrumental, you want to approach it the right way. So you sit on it.” Six months later, the rapper started toying with different cadences.
Meanwhile, Pharrell already had a hook in mind: “We gon’ be alright, we gon’ be alright.” “That chorus I had for a while, the feeling of that chorus,” he’s quoted as saying on AMC’s Hip Hop: The Songs That Shook America. “Kendrick recontextualized it. The chorus I had was about guys in a hood environment who maybe sell dope as… their only means of getting out, but then you have to flush it because the cops run in. And them thinking to themselves that they just lost everything, but we gon’ be alright. But Kendrick smartly looked at it and thought about it from a broader perspective, and thought about the culture, and thought about what the culture was going through at the time.” The rapper framed his lyrics around the intensity of what was happening in America. “I remember hitting P on a text like, Man, I got the lyrics,” he told Rubin for GQ. “And typing the lyrics to him. He’s like, That’s it.” The lyrics were influenced by the severe poverty he saw in South Africa. “They struggle maybe ten times harder and was raised crazier than what I was,” he told MTV News. “That was the moment I knew, ‘OK, I can either pimp this situation or I can fall victim to it.’ That was a turning point.” But look at the lyrics closely: they also extend the album’s theme of diving deeper into Kendrick’s personal torment. “Alright” continued the theme of Lucy—or Lucifer the devil—as an evil spirit that dogged him as he became famous. In his world, Lucy rests in his psyche, telling him to buy expensive cars, big houses, and lots of clothes because he deserves it. Go live at the mall, Lucy says, you’re a big-time celebrity now. On “Wesley’s Theory” and “For Sale? (Interlude),” Kendrick introduces the character, but here he’s trying to stave it off. “I didn’t wanna self-destruct,” he declares in a spoken-word poem near the end of the track. “The evils of Lucy was all around me.”
Once completed, “Alright” became the most pop-centered song on To Pimp a Butterfly, an abrasive protest track made specifically for people of color who were tired of seeing their brothers and sisters killed by police. But this wasn’t meant to be “We Shall Overcome” or anything nice. “Alright” was a fierce middle finger to the establishment and the same law enforcement that killed Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and so many before them. The song had to be bold; it had to ruffle feathers. The lyrics had to cut straight and make listeners feel uncomfortable. And they did, especially if you weren’t of the community to whom he was speaking. “And we hate popo,” Kendrick declared. “Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho’.”
Released in March 2015, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, “Alright” took direct aim at racist cops and tapped into the pain of disgruntled black people throughout the world. It had the hostility of N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” and the soulful grit of early seventies Stevie Wonder tracks like “Living for the City” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’.” Finally, the new generation had a protest anthem that spoke truth to power. This wasn’t a time for popping bottles or any other stereotype; we were under attack and needed something to release the steam. Kendrick sounded irate, but when paired with Pharrell’s lush backing track and Terrace Martin’s light saxophone wails, “Alright” paved a way forward for the black community, that—yes—things are messed up right now, but throughout history, we’ve endured the worst of humanity and still come out on top. We’re in a bad way at the moment, but as long as we have each other, we’ll find some form of nirvana.
Then there was the video—a dense, cinematic marvel shot in foreboding black and white. The imagery is dramatic, just like the song: a black boy facedown on the concrete, blood splattered on the face of another hoodie-clad youth. A police officer slams a man to the ground and handcuffs him. He gets up and runs, and the officer fires a shot from his service weapon. The bullet ejects in slow motion, whether or not it
