Alright

Pharrell Williams built the beat in 2014 with another rapper, Fabolous, in mind. Kendrick Lamar started writing to it as soon as he heard it, but at first felt it did not sit well with the jazz and funk of the album he was making, To Pimp a Butterfly. Only after Sounwave and Terrace Martin worked new drums into the track did Lamar approve it. He told MTV News the song took shape after a visit to South Africa, where seeing the problems people faced made their struggle seem ten times harder than his. The track opens with a line borrowed from Alice Walker's The Color Purple about having to fight all your life, and it carries the album's running character Lucy, whose evil hangs around him and who gets bigger as Lamar does. Against those verses of pressure and doubt, Pharrell sings a five-syllable hook of simple reassurance. In 2015 young protesters at Black Lives Matter demonstrations began chanting that hook, and publications from Rolling Stone to Complex called it the movement's unifying soundtrack. When Lamar first performed it at the BET Awards, standing on a graffiti-covered police car, Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera condemned the performance; Lamar answered by asking how a message of hope could be turned into hate. The song won two Grammy Awards, Pitchfork named it the best song of the 2010s, and it is still the chorus people reach for when they need to say, together, that they will get through.