With two classic albums under his belt, Kendrick didn’t have anything else to prove to the public. He achieved in two albums what it might take others four or five albums to accomplish: Kendrick wasn’t only being compared with his peers, he was now being lumped in with the greats: Jay-Z, Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur. He could only dream of these comparisons four years earlier, but now his records hit on that level, even if he couldn’t fully believe it himself. He was simply saying what was on his mind as a form of release; that rap fans received it so passionately was both surprising and gratifying.
Behind the scenes, though, he was already thinking ahead to the next project, steadfast as always. “That’s Kendrick,” Sounwave told Red Bull Music Academy in 2019. “He was on his fourth album, skip the third album. His brain is… I can’t explain it, but we literally just finished mastering To Pimp a Butterfly and he was like, ‘Alright, that’s cool. So for this next album.’ I’m like, ‘Bro, no, it’s not even out yet. Let it get out first and then we’ll start talking about it.’ And he was like, ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. They gonna get that. For this next album… we gonna do this, we gonna do that. I want to bring this back.’ You just gotta go with it because he’s a genius.” Kendrick still had to promote To Pimp a Butterfly, and he was thinking beyond the conventional setup of him and a live band, or him and Ali with nothing else. He was way past that; it was time to level up even further. He was a crossover star now, and his collaborations began to reflect his new self. Kendrick was rapping on Taylor Swift songs (on “Bad Blood”), flowing on the remix of singer Jidenna’s wildly popular track “Classic Man.” Surely he could flex a little bit, but he was still Kendrick, and To Pimp a Butterfly was still the record to beat that year. His next performance had to be the boldest act he’d ever pulled off—at least to that point.
On June 28, 2015, Kendrick ventured to the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles for the fifteenth annual BET Awards. It was a star-studded affair, just like the Grammys that the rapper attended the prior year, but this show was black—beautifully black. Janelle Monáe was there. As were actors Tracee Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson (himself a Compton native). Producer and label mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs organized an onstage reunion of 1990s stalwart Bad Boy Records. Motown legend Smokey Robinson sang “Cruisin’ ” and other hallmarks from his catalog. It felt like a reunion, a strong celebration of blackness. At the beginning of the show was Kendrick, standing on top of a hollowed-out police cruiser with graffiti covering its frame. In the background was a massive American flag, its ends frayed and swaying in the breeze. That alone was symbolic: at a time when the country was divided along racial and political lines, the flag represented the tattered unity in which the nation prided itself, the fabric being pulled apart and torn so gently. Standing around Kendrick were dancers, scores of them, all choreographed to move in lockstep with each other beneath a makeshift streetlight. From the outside, the scene felt chaotic, dangerous, one step away from falling apart. It represented America in 2015, with all its rhetoric and empty apologies to people of color. With each bullet came prayers for the fallen and the plea for unity from others who didn’t look like us. So there was something about Kendrick standing on that car, his shoes grinding into its roof with a wry smile on his face. He looked powerful, like a leader, like a free black man. In this moment he became a symbol, no longer a rapper or anything mortal. You had to look up at him on that deconstructed cop car, and what a throne that was.
Kendrick was there to perform “Alright,” the movement’s new anthem, with all its anti-police lyrics and strong pro-black stance. The live performance, much like To Pimp a Butterfly, was designed to shake up the system and speak the harshest honesty. It went back to what Terrace Martin had said about Kendrick’s mind-set going into the record: he was saying what needed to be said, boldly and without fear. It was about making people uncomfortable, to change the discourse surrounding black trauma, depression, and racism. “We were excited when those brothers were protesting, and the police were there, and all you heard in the background was ‘We gon’ be alright!’ ” Martin tells me. “We were excited by things that really mattered to our people. We’re from L.A. and dealing with a whole line of issues. The feeling was like, ‘Man, I know somebody’s gonna get the message,’ and I was so happy it was done because I felt like our people needed something. They needed something to look at, something to feel, something to listen to. I felt like our people needed and wanted something real and honest, something that was a fine display of challenge, breakthrough, and courage.”
The police cruiser was designed by a painter named Blue, an acquaintance of Kendrick and TDE. The label approached him with the idea of having Kendrick perform on top of the cop car, and because the artist had sketched a live painting a month prior for the rapper’s gig on Ellen, he was a natural fit to tag the police cruiser for Kendrick’s BET Awards performance. At the BET Awards, in a room full of black people, “Alright” hit harder. There was something poignant about it, and not since N.W.A, Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” or J Dilla’s “Fuck the Police” had an artist been so direct about how he and his community felt about abusive law enforcement. To see it interpreted that way—atop a symbol of such mistreatment—crystallized the song
