Kendrick Lamar's 'Alright' becomes the de facto Black Lives Matter anthem

Why it matters

"Alright" came out June 30, 2015, as the second single from To Pimp a Butterfly. Pharrell Williams co-produced with Sounwave. Pharrell originally pitched Kendrick the beat. Kendrick wrote the song over it ("we gon' be alright") in a register that was clearly meant to be a kind of survival mantra rather than a celebration. What happened to the song in the months after it dropped was not what the marketing rollout had planned for. By late summer 2015, the chorus was being chanted at Black Lives Matter protests across the country: Cleveland after the Tamir Rice grand jury, Baltimore after Freddie Gray, Ferguson on the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death. The chant was self-organizing; nobody was planning to play the song. People just sang it back, in unison, in the streets. By 2020, after the George Floyd protests, "Alright" was widely treated as the defining political-protest record of the 2010s. Kendrick had not written it as an anthem. The audience made it an anthem. You can argue that is the strongest version of a protest song: not the one written for the moment, but the one the moment chooses to sing.