The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  Meanwhile, Pharrell already had a hook in mind: “We gon’ be alright, we gon’ be alright.” “That chorus I had for a while, the feeling of that chorus,” he’s quoted as saying on AMC’s Hip Hop: The Songs That Shook America. “Kendrick recontextualized it. The chorus I had was about guys in a hood environment who maybe sell dope as… their only means of getting out, but then you have to flush it because the cops run in. And them thinking to themselves that they just lost everything, but we gon’ be alright. But Kendrick smartly looked at it and thought about it from a broader perspective, and thought about the culture, and thought about what the culture was going through at the time.” The rapper framed his lyrics around the intensity of what was happening in America. “I remember hitting P on a text like, Man, I got the lyrics,” he told Rubin for GQ. “And typing the lyrics to him. He’s like, That’s it.” The lyrics were influenced by the severe poverty he saw in South Africa. “They struggle maybe ten times harder and was raised crazier than what I was,” he told MTV News. “That was the moment I knew, ‘OK, I can either pimp this situation or I can fall victim to it.’ That was a turning point.” But look at the lyrics closely: they also extend the album’s theme of diving deeper into Kendrick’s personal torment. “Alright” continued the theme of Lucy—or Lucifer the devil—as an evil spirit that dogged him as he became famous. In his world, Lucy rests in his psyche, telling him to buy expensive cars, big houses, and lots of clothes because he deserves it. Go live at the mall, Lucy says, you’re a big-time celebrity now. On “Wesley’s Theory” and “For Sale? (Interlude),” Kendrick introduces the character, but here he’s trying to stave it off. “I didn’t wanna self-destruct,” he declares in a spoken-word poem near the end of the track. “The evils of Lucy was all around me.”

  Once completed, “Alright” became the most pop-centered song on To Pimp a Butterfly, an abrasive protest track made specifically for people of color who were tired of seeing their brothers and sisters killed by police. But this wasn’t meant to be “We Shall Overcome” or anything nice. “Alright” was a fierce middle finger to the establishment and the same law enforcement that killed Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and so many before them. The song had to be bold; it had to ruffle feathers. The lyrics had to cut straight and make listeners feel uncomfortable. And they did, especially if you weren’t of the community to whom he was speaking. “And we hate popo,” Kendrick declared. “Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho’.”

  Released in March 2015, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, “Alright” took direct aim at racist cops and tapped into the pain of disgruntled black people throughout the world. It had the hostility of N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” and the soulful grit of early seventies Stevie Wonder tracks like “Living for the City” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’.” Finally, the new generation had a protest anthem that spoke truth to power. This wasn’t a time for popping bottles or any other stereotype; we were under attack and needed something to release the steam. Kendrick sounded irate, but when paired with Pharrell’s lush backing track and Terrace Martin’s light saxophone wails, “Alright” paved a way forward for the black community, that—yes—things are messed up right now, but throughout history, we’ve endured the worst of humanity and still come out on top. We’re in a bad way at the moment, but as long as we have each other, we’ll find some form of nirvana.

  Then there was the video—a dense, cinematic marvel shot in foreboding black and white. The imagery is dramatic, just like the song: a black boy facedown on the concrete, blood splattered on the face of another hoodie-clad youth. A police officer slams a man to the ground and handcuffs him. He gets up and runs, and the officer fires a shot from his service weapon. The bullet ejects in slow motion, whether or not it strikes its target is unclear. Two frames later, TDE’s lead rappers bounce around in a car: Kendrick is behind the wheel as ScHoolboy Q rides shotgun; Ab-Soul and Jay Rock share a beer in the backseat. They’re in a celebratory mood, pouring what looks like malt liquor out the side of the vehicle, toasting to their vitality. “I’mma be the greatest to ever do this shit!” Kendrick proclaims in the clip. “On the dead homies!” Musically and visually, the scene evokes Busta Rhymes’s 1996 video for “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check.” As he and his friends glide down the road, a soul-inflected beat kicks in and Kendrick puffs out his chest even further: “To Pimp a Butterfly another classic ceedee-ah / Ghetto lullaby for everyone that emcee-ah.” Kendrick seemed to borrow the cadence and vocal tone of “Woo-Hah!!,” the lead single off Busta’s debut album, The Coming. Visually, the four guys in the car conjure the opening scene of “Woo-Hah!!” when Busta and friends ride through Times Square as the rapper spits the opening lines of the album cut “Everything Remains Raw.” In Kendrick’s video, the camera zooms out to reveal its most rewarding aspect: the TDE rappers aren’t actually driving down the street; they’re being carried by four police officers, a striking visual given the year of its release. Based on looks alone, the TDE rappers resembled the men the cops would likely target in the streets. “Once you get an image that strong, everything builds from there,” director Colin Tilley once told MTV News. “It’s not in your face like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck that.’ It’s more like, this is what’s real and what’s going on in the world right now.”

  From there, Kendrick floats throughout Los Angeles, almost like a superhero or a spirit overlooking the city. That was done on purpose. “The whole world we created is like a fantasy, a dream world,” Tilley said. The hero aspect was “him being something these kids can aspire towards. So, when they look up, it’s almost like it’s Superman.” In doing this, Kendrick showed Compton in a positive light, a journey he started on good kid, m.A.A.d city. In the final frame, he raps from atop a streetlight as a cop looks on beneath him. With his fingers twisted into a makeshift gun, he fires a shot, striking the rapper, who falls to the ground—both literally and figuratively. Kendrick had been on top of the world at that point in his life. But he was human, not some savior for hip-hop or humanity. It showed that even a transcendent talent like Kendrick could be cut down in an instant. “At the end of the day, we’re all human and that nobody’s untouchable,” Tilley told MTV News.

  “Alright” drew a line back to 1989 and another rap protest song—Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”—which gave listeners a jolt they didn’t know they needed. The musical theme of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, “Fight the Power” was a boastful track in which the rappers Chuck D and Flavor Flav nudged listeners to rise above oppression. “We needed an anthem,” Lee once told Rolling Stone. “When I wrote the script… every time when the Radio Raheem character showed up, he had music blasting. I wanted Public Enemy.” The year prior, the group had released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a bombastic collage of social consciousness that passed muster with the rap community, though they hadn’t become mainstream stars just yet. “Fight the Power” helped them break through; their no-nonsense flows and forceful beats somehow clicked with bigger audiences. “When Public Enemy first started,” Hank Shocklee recalls, “people were listening to the rhythms and the rhymes and weren’t paying attention to the content. Most people just wanted [‘Fight the Power’] because they thought it was noisy and aggressive and all that other stuff.” Because the song was tied to a big film like Do the Right Thing, “it was embraced by the intellectuals of music, the writers, the scholars who were still into hip-hop. It also spawned a whole group of artists who implemented that same vibration. It was the beginning of conscious rap. We found out that all over the United States, everyone was feeling the same vibration, but no one was talking about it, no one was actually voicing that.” The same went for Kendrick; the song “Alright” and To Pimp a Butterfly changed the vibration; it took hold as another two names became hashtags on social media: Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland.

  On April 12, 2015, twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray was arrested by six police officers in Baltimore for possessing what they tho
ught was a switchblade, which had been deemed illegal under Maryland law. Gray was thought to be a troubled man who had grown up in the neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester on Baltimore’s west side. According to reports, he’d been arrested multiple times and served time for various drug charges. The circumstances surrounding Gray’s arrest were murky: for whatever reason, he ran from the police when he saw them, and after he was handcuffed, he was seen on video saying that he had asthma and asked for an inhaler. Then he was arrested and dragged into a police van, where officers folded his body into an awkward position while putting him in custody. With his hands and feet shackled, he was said to be slammed head-first onto the van floor, even though it’s Baltimore police policy to buckle prisoners into van seats during transportation. Not only did he struggle to breathe, Gray was suffering from a spinal injury but was never given medical attention. Police kept driving toward the police station, eventually reaching their destination shortly before 9:30 a.m.

  On April 18, hundreds of Baltimore residents gathered in front of the Western District police station to protest his arrest and injury, and because emotions still ran high between black people and the police, the Gray incident had the potential of running hot before peace intervened. Gray died the next day, on April 19. Yet another young black man had perished under suspicious circumstances, leaving the community enraged. They wanted answers, and they wanted them right now. The Gray incident exacerbated long-simmering tensions between the police and community in West Baltimore, and on April 25—two days before Gray’s funeral—an organized protest spiraled into chaos outside the Baltimore Orioles baseball stadium in the city’s downtown area. Some businesses were looted. Police cruisers were pelted with rocks. There was a sense that trouble was on the way, that the small spat of violence during the April 25 protest could escalate into something much bigger if city officials didn’t pay attention. A mysterious flyer on Instagram encouraged residents to “purge” (a reference to a movie of the same name, in which crime is legal for a period of twelve hours).

  On April 27 and over the next five days, riots raged throughout the city. Vehicles and businesses were set ablaze. It was easily the most tenuous time in Baltimore’s history, and with Black America on alert, then-mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake awarded $6.4 million to the Gray family as the result of a civil suit following a mistrial in his death. City officials had seen what happened in Ferguson and Cleveland, and now with its town in crisis, the mayor wanted to heal a community that’d been hurting for so long. But there was no putting a Band-Aid on this; no amount of money could make up for Gray’s death. And just like in Ferguson and Staten Island, at least one protester’s life came to an early end. Juan Grant, who was a close friend of Gray’s and led a protest at the Western District police station following the incident, was shot and killed on the fourth anniversary of Gray’s funeral. According to police and media reports, Grant had been driving to his grandmother’s home when his car collided with a dirt bike. The person on the bike shot and killed him. Grant was a father and devoted community activist who demanded justice for his slain friend. Now Grant’s family was left to wonder why he had been taken away so senselessly.

  On July 13, 2015, the body of Sandra Bland was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, where she was detained after a minor traffic stop. In a self-recorded cell phone video made public four years later, Bland and State Trooper Brian Encinia were seen having a tense exchange on the side of the road, as the officer—holding a stun gun—threatened to tag her if she didn’t get out of her vehicle. Bland’s death was ruled a suicide, which raised immediate questions from activists, who already distrusted law enforcement and figured they were lying about the circumstances of her passing. Though Encinia was indicted on a charge of perjury, the charge was dismissed after he agreed to never again work in law enforcement. Bland had been outspoken about police brutality and racial injustice, and up until 2019, the public was made to believe that the officer feared for his life, and that’s why he threatened her with a Taser. Yet the video said otherwise; Encinia grew increasingly frustrated with a person who knew her rights. “My sister died because a police officer saw her as a threatening black woman rather than human,” Bland’s sister, Sharon Cooper, once wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “Our mere existence is perceived as such a threat to police officers that we’re consistently asked to pay for our freedom with our bodies and sometimes even with our blood.… My sister was unafraid. Her strength gives us the power to continue to fight for her and say her name.”

  In late July 2015, amid incredibly high tensions, a crowd of protesters gathered on the campus of Cleveland State University to lament the killing of Tamir Rice. Demonstrators throughout the United States still seethed from similar deaths in other states, and almost daily, new groups of people took to the streets to rally against injustice. Following the Movement for Black Lives conference, where local demonstrators and members of Black Lives Matter met to discuss the rampant police brutality that swept the country, the group left the conference en route to the buses slated to take them to their respective homes. Standing outside, the group noticed police officers harassing a young boy for carrying what they thought was an open container of alcohol onto the bus. The boy was fourteen years old, and because the city had just mourned the death of Tamir, the strain reached a boiling point. Incredulous, the crowd questioned the transit police officer about why the child was being detained. They were pepper-sprayed. Someone in the crowd asked for the phone number of the boy’s mother. She was called and was soon there talking to police. According to news accounts, the boy was released from police custody and went home with his mother. The crowd of two hundred was elated; for the first time in almost a year, they had a win against law enforcement. Soon, a chant started to billow throughout the mass:

  We gon’ be alright!

  We gon’ be alright!

  It was a heroic scene, a sea of triumphant black people walking through the streets, passing police cruisers like they weren’t even there. No way could this make up for the loss of life that permeated the past two years, but for a brief time, all the agony led to this moment, right there in Cleveland. In months past, the movement had escalated beyond peace and became violent at different points. But the Cleveland demonstration was a flash point for the movement overall, and now it had an anthem tying it together. Along with the strides activists made in cities like New York and Cleveland, the movement had its own “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” albeit with a few cusswords. But that was the temperature of the time. We were tired of trying to overcome and wanted equal treatment right now.

  The action was captured on video and instantly went viral. Just that quick, Kendrick’s music was at the center of a political movement, and the rapper—whether he knew it or not—was suddenly the country’s foremost purveyor of protest music. Kendrick and the team hadn’t created the art for a viral moment, but maybe that was why it resonated so strongly. It came from an honest place, from a hole of darkness and personal torment. It just happened to connect with the masses. But because he was so forthright about his strife, and because the song used straightforward language to denounce police brutality, “Alright” hit listeners in a very real way. Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, first heard the song on her way home from Ferguson, Missouri, where BLM and local demonstrators were gathered following the acquittal of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Mike Brown. “I remember seeing the ways in which these issues were being touched on,” Garza tells me. “The main message underneath it was morality, like, ‘What are we teaching our kids?’ It was a dose of reality for lots of people, and that rarely gets into the mainstream.” In 2016, as a businessman turned reality TV star named Donald Trump was running for U.S. president, protesters at the University of Illinois at Chicago chanted the hook of “Alright” after his rally was canceled for security reasons. By the end of the decade, music publications considered it one of the very best songs—if not the best song—of the 2010s. And unli
ke other commercial hits, which can be quantified through sales and streams, “Alright” touched people in ways that can’t be measured. “You might not have heard it on the radio all day,” Kendrick told Variety, “but you’re seeing it in the streets, you’re seeing it on the news, and you’re seeing it in communities, and people felt it.”

  “Alright,” and To Pimp a Butterfly as a whole, wasn’t just of the moment; the song and album were instant classics that lobbed Kendrick into the pantheon of rap’s all-time greats. Critics openly wondered if he was now the greatest rapper the world had ever seen, and whether his body of work was the best catalog ever compiled. That’s lofty praise for someone who hadn’t been in the game that long, who by his own admission hadn’t made his best work yet. He was still working, still keeping his head down in search of the perfect project. But when To Pimp a Butterfly was released—by surprise on March 15, 2015, a week before it was supposed to come out—it rocked the foundation of hip-hop and music overall, from its cover art, and the flurry of unabashed black music that tumbled from the speakers. It sounded far different from good kid, m.A.A.d city—a fact that angered some fans who craved that record’s opulent, wide-open soundscapes and tightly woven story line. To Pimp a Butterfly was more sprawling and more ambitious, a complicated patchwork of themes and ideas. It was angrier, denser, and made for headphone listening. More than anything, it was the sound of Kendrick battling his demons in front of his biggest audience, which not only alleviated the pressure he faced, but also somehow enabled him to connect it with all sorts of listeners. “Kendrick had so much respect from everybody,” Robert Glasper tells me. “He spoke to the jazz cats, to the music nerds, to the backpack rappers, the gangsters. That album touched everybody.”