1 song, DaBaby and Roddy Ricch’s “Rockstar,” now has a Black Lives Matter remix with a verse about run-ins with cops. Atlanta rhymer Lil Baby’s “ The Bigger Picture” applies the clearheaded, emotive writing of songs like “Hurtin,” “No Friends,” and “Emotionally Scarred” to straightforward political messaging and comes out with the kind of protest song that also has designs on being a hit. Meek Mill’s “ The Other Side of America” employs the Philly artist’s spitfire raps and heartfelt verses to outline the conditions that drive people to do and sell drugs, critiquing a government that lines its own pockets while leaving many citizens to fend for themselves. transplant Jay Cue’s new “Fuck Racists” seethes with retaliatory outrage. Indiana rhymer Freddie Gibbs’s “ Scottie Beam” recounts an unnecessary police stop Albany’s Conway addresses cops using deadly force against innocent Black citizens in the scathing “ Front Lines.” Compton rapper YG (whose “FDT” was one of the defining anthems of our election anxiety in 2016) released “ FTP,” the latest in a long line of powerfully rude songs about LAPD mistreatment L.A. Rappers are putting in work there’s a new one out almost every day, from sources both expected and unexpected. The moment requires a different kind of protest song. The world the song envisioned seems far away, though not out of reach. The sentiment suddenly felt premature, like the big hit landing too early in the live show.
What wasn’t clear is how long it could take.Īs weeks of unrest became a yearslong struggle for transparency amid mounting cases of unexplained incidents of police brutality, “Alright” grew a strange aftertaste. We needed to hear that we would be alright. Lamar came out to stir the pot a little more before playing the song in full. The Kunta’s Groove Sessions, Lamar’s small-venue To Pimp a Butterfly tour, turned “Alright” into a lengthy crowd participation exercise, as the audience chanted the chorus of the one song they hadn’t heard yet in the break before the encore. In the middle of the album, “Alright” sticks out, invoking the steely composure of old Negro spirituals, songs about tarrying through tough times in search of the glory on the other side, in emancipation or in death.
The protagonist’s path to freedom takes him around predatory lending schemes (“Wesley’s Theory”), a rigged prison system (“Institutionalized”), gang violence (“Hood Politics”), alcohol abuse (“u”), and colorism (“Complexion”). Butterfly is a thesis about persecution and perseverance, a trip through a battlefield riddled with mines. The unwitting theme song of the wave of protests that carried on through 2015 - as news broke of the mass murder at Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail - was Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” the cornerstone of the Compton rapper’s challenging, eclectic sophomore album To Pimp a Butterfly. church where protesters decrying police brutality were cleared out with tear gas to make room for the photo op is one of the many indelible artifacts of a chilling chapter of American history. The image of Trump holding a Bible upside down in front of a D.C. In November of 2014, when a second round of protests followed news of no indictment for Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the Mike Brown case, Donald Trump, then a tycoon and reality star barreling carelessly into politics, spoke on the situation on Twitter: “Our country is totally fractured and with our weak leadership in Washington, you can expect Ferguson type riots and looting in other places.” Four years into his presidency, we’ve been made painfully aware of what he would do to suppress a protest. Louis Police Department faced a community incensed by the unfair policing and anti-Black violence that had culminated in the death of Mike Brown, armed with stun grenades and MRAPs, weapons of warfare, and the many months of civil disobedience and extralegal disruption that followed, and realizing it wasn’t the end of something but the tremors before an earthquake. It’s disorienting looking back at the unrest of 20. The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.”
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