From there, Kendrick floats throughout Los Angeles, almost like a superhero or a spirit overlooking the city. That was done on purpose. “The whole world we created is like a fantasy, a dream world,” Tilley said. The hero aspect was “him being something these kids can aspire towards. So, when they look up, it’s almost like it’s Superman.” In doing this, Kendrick showed Compton in a positive light, a journey he started on good kid, m.A.A.d city. In the final frame, he raps from atop a streetlight as a cop looks on beneath him. With his fingers twisted into a makeshift gun, he fires a shot, striking the rapper, who falls to the ground—both literally and figuratively. Kendrick had been on top of the world at that point in his life. But he was human, not some savior for hip-hop or humanity. It showed that even a transcendent talent like Kendrick could be cut down in an instant. “At the end of the day, we’re all human and that nobody’s untouchable,” Tilley told MTV News.
“Alright” drew a line back to 1989 and another rap protest song—Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”—which gave listeners a jolt they didn’t know they needed. The musical theme of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, “Fight the Power” was a boastful track in which the rappers Chuck D and Flavor Flav nudged listeners to rise above oppression. “We needed an anthem,” Lee once told Rolling Stone. “When I wrote the script… every time when the Radio Raheem character showed up, he had music blasting. I wanted Public Enemy.” The year prior, the group had released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a bombastic collage of social consciousness that passed muster with the rap community, though they hadn’t become mainstream stars just yet. “Fight the Power” helped them break through; their no-nonsense flows and forceful beats somehow clicked with bigger audiences. “When Public Enemy first started,” Hank Shocklee recalls, “people were listening to the rhythms and the rhymes and weren’t paying attention to the content. Most people just wanted [‘Fight the Power’] because they thought it was noisy and aggressive and all that other stuff.” Because the song was tied to a big film like Do the Right Thing, “it was embraced by the intellectuals of music, the writers, the scholars who were still into hip-hop. It also spawned a whole group of artists who implemented that same vibration. It was the beginning of conscious rap. We found out that all over the United States, everyone was feeling the same vibration, but no one was talking about it, no one was actually voicing that.” The same went for Kendrick; the song “Alright” and To Pimp a Butterfly changed the vibration; it took hold as another two names became hashtags on social media: Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland.
On April 12, 2015, twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray was arrested by six police officers in Baltimore for possessing what they thought was a switchblade, which had been deemed illegal under Maryland law. Gray was thought to be a troubled man who had grown up in the neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester on Baltimore’s west side. According to reports, he’d been arrested multiple times and served time for various drug charges. The circumstances surrounding Gray’s arrest were murky: for whatever reason, he ran from the police when he saw them, and after he was handcuffed, he was seen on video saying that he had asthma and asked for an inhaler. Then he was arrested and dragged into a police van, where officers folded his body into an awkward position while putting him in custody. With his hands and feet shackled, he was said to be slammed head-first onto the van floor, even though it’s Baltimore police policy to buckle prisoners into van seats during transportation. Not only did he struggle to breathe, Gray was suffering from a spinal injury but was never given medical attention. Police kept driving toward the police station, eventually reaching their destination shortly before 9:30 a.m.
On April 18, hundreds of Baltimore residents gathered in front of the Western District police station to protest his arrest and injury, and because emotions still ran high between black people and the police, the Gray incident had the potential of running hot before peace intervened. Gray died the next
