Alright (2015)

"Alright" is a song by American rapper Kendrick Lamar featured on his third studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). The song expresses ideas of hope amid personal struggles and was co-produced by Pharrell Williams. "Alright" was released to radio stations as the album's fourth single on June 30, 2015. Many music publications considered it among the best songs and videos of the year. "Alright" received four nominations at the 58th Grammy Awards: Song of the Year, Best Music Video, Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song, winning the latter two. It was also nominated for a MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year.

The song was associated with the Black Lives Matter movement after several youth-led protests were heard chanting the chorus. Publications such as Rolling Stone, People, and Complex noted the song's importance in the protests calling "Alright" the "unifying soundtrack" of the movement. In 2019, it was named the best song of the 2010s by Pitchfork. Lamar, alongside notable artists Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and 50 Cent, performed "Alright" at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show on February 13, 2022.

In 2024, the song appeared on Williams' soundtrack album Piece by Piece (Music from the Motion Picture).

Inspiration and structure

In an interview with MTV News, Lamar stated that he found inspiration for "Alright" while visiting South Africa and witnessing problems that locals faced: "their struggle was ten times harder." The track opens with lines from Alice Walker's The Color Purple, "Alls my life, I had to fight". In "Alright", Lamar introduces a character named Lucy, who plays an essential role throughout the album. In the track's lyrics, as Lamar gets bigger, so does Lucy: "ain't a profit big enough to feed you". At the end of the track, Lamar discusses suicidal thoughts once in a hotel room "I didn't wanna self-destruct... The evils of Lucy was all around me." Musically, the track features marching band propulsion and a jazz band's breezy reeds. For his sole production credit, Pharrell Williams, who made the track with Digi+Phonics' member Sounwave, sings the hook.

Recording

Pharrell Williams produced the song's instrumental in 2014, originally intending it for Fabolous. After hearing the beat, Lamar immediately began to write lyrics for the song, however, he initially felt that it didn't mesh well with jazz and funk influences of To Pimp a Butterfly. Sounwave then worked with Terrace Martin to incorporate drums into the instrumental, which led to Lamar approving the song for the album.

Critical reception

"Alright" received widespread critical acclaim from music critics.

Ranked number one on Pitchfork's "The 100 Best Tracks of 2015" and "The 200 Best Songs of the 2010s", an editor praised the chorus "We gon' be alright," and described it as "an ebulliently simple five-syllable refrain, a future-tense assertion of delivery to a better, more peaceful place," adding "In more than one instance, the song's chorus was chanted at Black Lives Matter protests. It has soundtracked a movement." Consequence of Sound also ranked the song number one on its "Top 50 Songs of 2015" list, the magazine's editors described the song as "buoyant, festive, serious, personal, and all-encompassing. Only a song so brilliant in so many ways could earn the honor of becoming a protest song ... 'Alright' isn't about determination; it's about forgetting cold, harsh reality and hoping for something brighter and better if only for three minutes and 39 seconds." Complex magazine quoted an organizer of a Black Lives Matter protest in Denver: "Music uplifts our community, and so we were playing different songs that have been our ‘struggle anthems’ to equality so that black people can say their lives matter," he explains. "And so Kendrick's song is something that is a rallying cry."