Resentment that turned into a deep depressionĪfter ascending from a “peasant, to a prince, to a motherfucking king” in “King Kunta”, feeling lost & jaded in the four corners of the cocoon throughout “These Walls”, and contemplating suicide in a hotel room on ‘u’ – Kendrick continues to add to the poem he reads on the final track “Mortal Man.”ĭuring his alcoholic binge in the hotel room, Kendrick “found” himself. Misusing your influence, sometimes I did the same But I believe the Poem Kendrick Left before the song ended fit in But I can’t do the song justice enough for how powerful it is. Playing the the ideals of what he’s struggling with. Kendrick puts a lot of his emotion in this song. “Homie We fucked up, but if god got us then we gone be alright!”įantastic personally, that ideal that life is hard, and it’s something that people can’t take sometimes, but if you have god in your corner. And he makes a positive outlook in the next part. This is clearly a sort of symbolic reference to Kendrick fighting his depressing.
But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me.” But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. This is a clear reference to the powerful speech in the color purple. The sign Alright really motivates you to continue on with life. For his sole production credit, Pharrell Williams, who made the track with Digi+Phonics’ member Sounwave, sings the hook. Musically, it features marching band propulsion and a jazz band’s breezy reeds. The song begins as a spoken-word treatise before exploding into a shapeshifting portrait of America that brings in jazz horns, skittering drum beats and Lamar’s mellifluous rapping as he struggles with troubles and temptations. The evils of Lucy was all around me.” For music critics a “celebration of being alive”, Lamar described “Alright” as message of hope. At the end of the track, Lamar talks about his suicidal thoughts once in a hotel room “I didn’t wanna self-destruct. Kendrick definitely put a lot of heart and soul it into this.Īccording to the lyrics, as Lamar gets bigger so does Lucy: “ain’t a profit big enough to feed you”. Lamar introduced the character “Lucy”, who plays an essential role in the remainder of the album.
In an interview with MTV News, Lamar said it was inspired by his trip to South Africa, witnessing other people’s problems in the country: “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”. The hook, “We gon’ be alright!” allowed Lamar to use the symbolism inherent to spur the rest of the song’s lyrics that eventually resonated with an entire movement. Originally, Pharrell Williams created the beat and only six months later, Williams came up with a hook that inspired Lamar to find the right lyrics.
“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. Most music publications considered it among the best songs and videos of the year, highlighting their message in the social context of the time. “Alright” was released to radio stations as the album’s fourth single on June 30, 2015. Alright" is a song by American rapper Kendrick Lamar, taken from his third album To Pimp a Butterfly, which was released in 2015 Lyrically a festive song about hope, it features uncredited vocals from the song’s co-producer Pharrell Williams during the chorus.