FEATURE:
Groovelines
IN THIS PHOTO: The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s Alright/PHOTO CREDIT: Kendrick Lamar/YouTube
Kendrick Lamar – Alright
___________
HERE is a song…
that is still hugely impactful and relevant in 2021. Released in 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s Alright is taken from his third studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly. A song about hope amid personal struggles, it features uncredited vocals from the song's co-producer Pharrell Williams during the chorus. From a masterpiece album, Alright is a clear highlight. I want to bring in a few articles that explore a song with enormous political and social resonance. This Business Insider article discussed how the song was used in rallies and assemblies in 2015:
“Beyond being an incredible song, its chorus became a rallying cry of protesters in the United States — "a kind of comfort that people of color and other oppressed communities desperately need all too often: the hope — the feeling — that despite tensions in this country growing worse and worse, in the long run, we’re all gon’ be all right," as Slate culture writer Aisha Harris put it.
In Chicago, when people gathered to protest a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, "We gon' be alright!" was sung in celebration of the rally's cancellation.
And in 2015, a Black Lives Matter assembly in Cleveland chanted the song's chorus, reportedly in response to police arresting a 14-year-old protester.
Countless other examples exist. More than just a great song, "Alright" is the anthem of the modern civil rights movement.
It's joined socially-conscious hits like Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" as bigger than music. "Alright" is an incredible achievement for a man who's already achieved so much. And it's one that almost didn't happen”.
I am not sure whether Kendrick Lamar hoped his song would be used in protests. I guess it is a track that offers hope and strength at difficult times. Alright hit me when I first heard it back in 2015. Every time I come back to it, I am moved and affected! It is such an incredible song that will be heard and remembered many years from now. NPR talked about Alight in 2019. They go into more detail regarding the song’s creation:
“Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly was released in the spring of 2015. "Alright" was the fourth single off the record. It's hard to say exactly when the song was first used at a protest, but the story in Cleveland touched on many of the issues of the moment concerning police relations with black people. At similar demonstrations, the chanted hook quickly became a fixture.
In a 2016 interview with super-producer Rick Rubin hosted by GQ, Lamar said he sat on the beat — dreamed up by another super-producer, Pharrell Williams — for six months before figuring out what he wanted to say. "The beat sounds fun," he said. "But it's something else inside the chords that Pharrell put down."
The dah dah dahs that make up those chords are Williams' own disembodied voice, running constantly through the song. They're haunting, in a way. "Maybe it's the ancestors who never received the justice they deserved," says Miles Marshall Lewis.
The author of the upcoming book Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar, Lewis interviewed Lamar after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly and learned the artist was inspired to write "Alright" by a trip to South Africa — specifically the cell on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. Similarly, Lamar told NPR in a 2015 interview that he was thinking about the history of chattel slavery in America.
"Four hundred years ago, as slaves, we prayed and sung joyful songs to keep our heads level-headed with what was going on," Lamar said. "Four hundred years later, we still need that music to heal. And I think that 'Alright' is definitely one of those records that makes you feel good no matter what the times are."
In the song's prechorus, Lamar lays this feeling out succinctly. He begins in the past:
Wouldn't you know, we been hurt, been down before
When our pride was low
Looking at the world like "Where do we go?"
The emotional payoff of the chorus isn't complete without this lead-in, acknowledging the long history of black oppression. Then he brings us back to the present, where things are different, but not different enough:
And we hate po-po
Wanna kill us dead in the streets for sure
I'm at the preacher's door
My knees getting weak, and my gun might blow,
But we gon' be alright
When the narrator shows up at a preacher's door, reeling in the face of police violence and oppression, he's holding a gun. Lewis says the moment reflects the old duality of the civil rights struggle: "He might trade in the Martin hat for the Malcolm hat, and have to defend himself”.
I am going to end the feature soon enough. Before coming to that point, there is a fascinating article from Vulture that was released last year. Given the Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of George Floyd, songs like Alright have taken on new life and meaning. The article investigates the violent unrest of 2014/2015; also how Alright has gained new popularity and focus fairly recently:
“It’s disorienting looking back at the unrest of 2014 and 2015. At the hot summer night when the St. Louis Police Department faced a community incensed by the unfair policing and anti-Black violence that had culminated in the death of Mike Brown, armed with stun grenades and MRAPs, weapons of warfare, and the many months of civil disobedience and extralegal disruption that followed, and realizing it wasn’t the end of something but the tremors before an earthquake. The rift never healed. In November of 2014, when a second round of protests followed news of no indictment for Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the Mike Brown case, Donald Trump, then a tycoon and reality star barreling carelessly into politics, spoke on the situation on Twitter: “Our country is totally fractured and with our weak leadership in Washington, you can expect Ferguson type riots and looting in other places.” Four years into his presidency, we’ve been made painfully aware of what he would do to suppress a protest. The image of Trump holding a Bible upside down in front of a D.C. church where protesters decrying police brutality were cleared out with tear gas to make room for the photo op is one of the many indelible artifacts of a chilling chapter of American history.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during the BET Awards at the Microsoft Theater on 28th June, 2015 in Los Angeles/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Polk/BET/Getty Images for BET
The unwitting theme song of the wave of protests that carried on through 2015 — as news broke of the mass murder at Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail — was Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” the cornerstone of the Compton rapper’s challenging, eclectic sophomore album To Pimp a Butterfly. Butterfly is a thesis about persecution and perseverance, a trip through a battlefield riddled with mines. The protagonist’s path to freedom takes him around predatory lending schemes (“Wesley’s Theory”), a rigged prison system (“Institutionalized”), gang violence (“Hood Politics”), alcohol abuse (“u”), and colorism (“Complexion”). In the middle of the album, “Alright” sticks out, invoking the steely composure of old Negro spirituals, songs about tarrying through tough times in search of the glory on the other side, in emancipation or in death. The Kunta’s Groove Sessions, Lamar’s small-venue To Pimp a Butterfly tour, turned “Alright” into a lengthy crowd participation exercise, as the audience chanted the chorus of the one song they hadn’t heard yet in the break before the encore. Lamar came out to stir the pot a little more before playing the song in full. The feeling was electric. We needed to hear that we would be alright. What wasn’t clear is how long it could take.
As weeks of unrest became a yearslong struggle for transparency amid mounting cases of unexplained incidents of police brutality, “Alright” grew a strange aftertaste. The sentiment suddenly felt premature, like the big hit landing too early in the live show. The world the song envisioned seems far away, though not out of reach. The moment requires a different kind of protest song. Rappers are putting in work; there’s a new one out almost every day, from sources both expected and unexpected. Indiana rhymer Freddie Gibbs’s “Scottie Beam” recounts an unnecessary police stop; Albany’s Conway addresses cops using deadly force against innocent Black citizens in the scathing “Front Lines.” Compton rapper YG (whose “FDT” was one of the defining anthems of our election anxiety in 2016) released “FTP,” the latest in a long line of powerfully rude songs about LAPD mistreatment; L.A. transplant Jay Cue’s new “Fuck Racists” seethes with retaliatory outrage. Meek Mill’s “The Other Side of America” employs the Philly artist’s spitfire raps and heartfelt verses to outline the conditions that drive people to do and sell drugs, critiquing a government that lines its own pockets while leaving many citizens to fend for themselves. Atlanta rhymer Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” applies the clearheaded, emotive writing of songs like “Hurtin,” “No Friends,” and “Emotionally Scarred” to straightforward political messaging and comes out with the kind of protest song that also has designs on being a hit. The country’s current No. 1 song, DaBaby and Roddy Ricch’s “Rockstar,” now has a Black Lives Matter remix with a verse about run-ins with cops. Common points of outrage in songs coming out of every corner of the country are a damning indictment of the status quo. When Northeast boom bap guys, Midwest spitters, newly minted Southern trap stars, and Cali gangsta rappers agree you suck, you suck.
So far, though, the internet that weaponizes snark and gives new context and purpose to old songs and videos has picked intriguing contenders for the protest song of the moment. When a woman being detained outside a South Carolina strip club improvised a song about getting the officer fired, and enterprising internet users made a trap remix, the viral smash “Lose Yo Job” was born. Just as popular is a track from the mid-aughts Discovery Channel kids’ show Hip Hop Harry that came to be called “Go, Go, Go, Who’s Next?” In the show, the song — a wholesome knockoff of Terror Squad’s “Lean Back” — plays as Harry, a dancing anthropomorphic teddy bear who raps, leads the kids in a dance-off not unlike Soul Train lines and break-dance team battles. “Who’s Next?” picked up steam first as an innocuous TikTok dance challenge and later evolved into a response to cloying corporate gestures of support for Black Lives Matter on Blackout Tuesday, as brands that spoke up were quickly criticized for questionable track records on race.
In this climate, existing songs about race and justice are newly poignant. Streams of Kendrick’s “Alright” jumped up almost 800 percent as protests broke out across the country. N.W.A’s trenchant “Fuck tha Police” got a bump, as did YG’s “FDT.” Late Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke’s 2019 smash “Dior,” might not seem like a first ballot theme song for marches against injustice, but there’s enough disappointment in the American prison system in the lyrics to make it work. Hip-hop’s social consciousness pokes through even when the artist is trying to be lighthearted”.
To me, Alight is one of the most important songs of the past couple of decades. Taken from the genius album, To Pimp a Butterfly, it is a musical moment that will live forever. From Lamar’s incredible lead performance to the amazing production and the stirring video, Alright is a classic! In the past year – as race and police brutality has been back in the news – that has offered unrest and injustice, Alright has been taken on as a rallying cry and protest mantra. It is a song that will infuse and inspire…
GENERATIONS of the future.