Home · Songs · Kendrick Lamar · Alright
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Credits
Music K. Duckworth, Mark Spears, Pharrell Williams
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The story behind
There are songs that not only sound, but become a collective heartbeat. Alright is one of them. It's not just a track by Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), but a cry of hope that resonated beyond the speakers: its chorus, that "We gon' be alright" repeated with an almost hypnotic cadence, ended up being chanted in marches across the country. The magic lies in how the sound —with its jazz brass that seem to rise above the chaos and a rhythm that oscillates between the martial and the organic— manages to convey that mix of urgency and calm that defines the song. Pharrell Williams, who produced the instrumental in 2014, gave the track that sticky hook that works like a breath of fresh air in the middle of the storm. What's curious is that, at first, Lamar wasn't sure about including it on the album: he felt the beat didn't fit the jazzy and funky essence of the record, but the work of Sounwave and Terrace Martin to adjust the percussion finally convinced him. The result is a track that doesn't sound like conventional rap, but something broader, as if hip-hop had met a marching band in full improvisation.
The lyrics, on the other hand, play with a recurring metaphor in the album: that of Lucy, a character who grows alongside the narrator and represents the shadows that haunt him. Lamar opens the track with a fragment from The Color Purple by Alice Walker ("Alls my life, I had to fight"), and closes with a raw verse about his suicidal thoughts in a hotel, where Lucy seems to envelop him ("The evils of Lucy was all around me"). But between these extremes, the track flows with an energy that contrasts with its content: the chorus, sung by Pharrell, acts like a beacon. It's no coincidence that, in 2019, Pitchfork named it the best song of the decade: its ability to be both intimate and universal made it inevitable. The video, shot in black and white and directed by Colin Tilley and The Little Homies, reinforces that duality: it shows everyday scenes from African American neighborhoods intertwined with images of Lamar at impossible heights, as if the ascent were both physical and emotional. In 2015, the track was nominated for four Grammy Awards, winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song, and the following year it became an unintentional anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. By 2022, it was already part of history: Lamar, alongside legends like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem, performed it at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show. It's not an exaggeration to say that, in just three minutes and thirty-nine seconds, Alright achieved something few songs manage: being the soundtrack of a struggle and, at the same time, a reminder that, no matter what happens, everything is going to be alright.