Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” is a Perfect Protest Song From an Imperfect Protester

American oppression is a centuries-long tradition. Garner was killed in July 2014. Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in 2020. He was taking a jog. In 1963, just hours after John F. Kennedy gave a nationally televised speech on the importance of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot through the heart. He was carrying shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go.” On Feb. 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was approached by a 29-year-old half-Peruvian, half-white man named George Zimmerman, and after some sort of altercation, Martin was left dead on the street. Zimmerman said he looked suspicious. Black folks said the same of Zimmerman. Naturally, the story became an international controversy, especially when Zimmerman wasn’t initially arrested. It didn’t get any smaller when he was officially acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in 2013. While the Black community condemned the verdict, Kendrick Lamar condemned the Black community.

In the first half of Black History Month 10 years ago, Kendrick released “The Blacker the Berry,” a scorching constellation of existential defiance and soul-baring rage. For the first two verses of the song, Kendrick sneers at the demons of white supremacy, turning his hoarse shouts and blunt barbs into a tank hell-bent on destruction. ”I want you to recognize that I'm a proud monkey / You vandalize my perception but can't take style from me,” he seethes. By the third verse, he’s turning his aggression on us — himself, Compton. Me, you. Through a barrage of searing couplets, he excoriates communities rooted in gang violence and those that would call out the white supremacy without analyzing the idea of Black on Black violence. That point spirals into a disappointingly elementary conclusion: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?”

When Kendrick calls himself a hypocrite at the end of the song, it’s meant to be a stunning role reversal. Instead, it’s a hollow rhetorical bullet point from the respectability politics handbook. The fault isn’t in Kendrick criticizing gang violence. As someone who grew up in a MOB Piru Bloods section of Compton, he’s lost countless friends to early graves. He’s not wrong to criticize that. And neither are the innumerable church and community organizers who’ve marched and demonstrated against it at thousands of anti-violence rallies over the last 40 years. Bashing gang violence isn’t incorrect. Bashing people who bash gang violence and white supremacy is. By doing so, Kendrick undermines not only his own humanity, but the spiritual endurance of Black folks everywhere. Up to that point — now, too — the wait for systemic justice has been met with the blandest, but most appropriate of cliches: “don’t hold your breath.” But we’ve held it. “Alright” was like a 3-minute and 39-second exhale.

A whirlwind of exasperated fury, “Alright” isn’t a song as much as an exorcism — of the white supremacist power structure, capitalism, us, Kendrick himself. For the first verse, he unspools a vignette of national and personal purgatory, collapsing the distance between police brutality, sleepless nights and American consumerism. Kendrick delivers the couplets themselves like rounds from a Draco. The last syllable in each bar lingers like a recoil. The breathless flow feels like sprinting a marathon: “Homicide looking at you from the face down / What MAC-11 even boom with the bass down? / Schemin', and let me tell you 'bout my life / Painkillers only put me in the twilight / Where pretty pussy and Benjamin is the highlight.”

Kendrick’s symbolism strikes the heart of a pain that spans generations of people, and perhaps iterations of yourself. His rhythms — a cascade of intermittent overflows — hit with an urgency hundreds of years in the making. Those words — those lightning bolts — fold into a refrain that bridges ages of Black plight:

“Wouldn't you know
We been hurt, been down before, nigga
When our pride was low
Lookin' at the world like, "Where do we go?" Nigga
And we hate po-po
Wanna kill us dead in the street for sure, nigga
I'm at the preacher's door
My knees gettin' weak and my gun might blow
But we gon' be alright.”

That reservoir of sensations and emotions crashes into a cathartic release of a crescendo: “Nigga, we gon' be alright.” If read without context, the line, which is delivered by a calm and cool Pharrell Williams, could scan as dismissive. Think Rico telling Ace Boogie, “Niggas get shot everyday, B.” But, within this labyrinth of feeling, it’s everything. A casual pat on the back. An extra timely, “C’mon, you got this.” We got this. Considering the perpetuity of Black tragedy, perhaps it’s best to look at the lyric as a self-assigned ultimatum: We gon’ be alright because we have to. We’ve always had to, and based on all available evidence, you can safely assume we’ll always have to.

It’s a theme that’s interwoven with the very structure of the song. When Kendrick isn’t rapping his verses, the beat itself can be spare — an emptier space fit for Kendrick and Pharrell’s words to linger, like a specter for divine justice. The hook itself is simple, yet symbolic, making it a perfect call-and-response for protesters — whether here or in Palestine. Marchers invoked the song during protests for Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. If it had been released then, Martin Luther King might have led a crowd in a group chant of, “We gon’ be alright” instead of “We shall overcome.”

The broadness of the track made it immortal; it’s as applicable now as it was 400 years ago, and barring an actual revolution, it will be true 400 years from now, too. It also insulated Kendrick from his own deeply flawed rhetorical tendencies. It’s the poetic equivalent of “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Kendrick might have been wrong to say we can’t fight police injustice and gang violence at the same time, but he’s right when he says we’re all fucked up. We are. Kendrick might spew some anti-vaxxer nonsense on tracks like “N-95,” but there was — and still is — a time when our pride was low and we looked at the world like, “where do we go?” Depending on your vantage point, he can be confusing, and loving him can be… complicated.

Maybe those supposed complications are only because we’re looking for perfection in the first place. Say this at the moment the internet wants you to, in the way it wants you to, or risk eternal damnation. Or even worse, being ratioed. It’s a high-wire act Kendrick has stumbled off of in moments like “The Blacker The Berry,” or when he collaborated with Kodak Black. On “Alright,” he ditches the tightrope in favor of levitation. He makes us feel like we’ll be alright, even if our mind knows we won’t.