*This week on episode #4 of The Big Hit Show’s second chapter — the series unpacks the mastermind of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and how the song viral ALRIGHT was used to galvanize protesters.
The song ALRIGHT quickly became a defining protest song amidst the Black Lives Matter movement, but the backstory of the song’s creation was wrapped in Kendrick’s self-criticism following the Ferguson protests. The episode goes on to detail the initial studio sessions with Pharrell, and how the hit song almost didn’t make the album. This episode features key interviews with: New York Times writer & critic Wesley Morris, Dr. Treva Lindsey, Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University, Pitchfork contributing editor Rawiya Kameir, music producer, bass, and keyboard player Rahki and more.
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Some highlights from the episode include:
- 0:20- In July 2015, a few months after Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, Dr. Lindsey was one of hundreds of organizers and activists who were in Cleveland at a conference called the National Convening of the Movement for Black Lives, where a Black fourteen-year-old boy was taken off a bus and taken into custody for being intoxicated. The people on the street linked arms and formed a barrier, to prevent the cops from driving off with the boy.
- Dr. Lindsey: We’re all at different places on this kind of corner. And we just start singing, “We gon’ be alright.” I mean, it just happens organically.
- And as we’re singing it, I kid you not, it is one of the most shocking moments, a butterfly literally appears from somewhere. I don’t know from where. I’m like, “Does someone just have like a butterfly in a jar and they released it at this moment?” If I were writing this in a movie, I’d be like, “This is absurd. Screenwriters, go back to the drawing board.
- And it’s this moment that stays with me and reminds me at the moments when I feel the most dejected and most hopeless…that there are these moments of victory…And that song was a rallying cry at some points, but it was also a song of affirming that the work we do deeply matters as well.
- Dr. Lindsey: We’re all at different places on this kind of corner. And we just start singing, “We gon’ be alright.” I mean, it just happens organically.
- 16:36 – Kendrick discusses the true meaning of that sunshiney “I Love Myself” hook with Ebro from Hot97 about the track “i” (archived interview from 2014).
- Archival (Ebro): A lot of people who love you…They’re taken aback by this single. They think it’s too mainstream, too soon. Like, you going pop, you going Top 40 on us. Talk to us about your decision to make this your single and make this type of sound.
- Archival (Kendrick): My initial idea of writing this record, really is for two people. I hit Top Dawg and said I wrote a record for the homies that’s in the penitentiary right now. I also wrote a record for these kids that come up to my show with these slashes on their wrist, who say they don’t want to live no more. [Oh like people cut themselves.] Yeah, yeah it’s serious. And people on the inside don’t feel like they got nothing to live for. People on the outside. I said okay, these my homies in the hood. If I say something this blatant, this bold, this simple, they can take a reaction from that. They can lock your body, they can’t trap your mind for my homies in the pen. For the people that’s outside you have some way more to live for. It starts with yourself first, and you won’t be thinking all these negative things that’s going on in the world.
32:16- Pharrell had produced one song for Kendrick on good kid, m.A.A.d city, and in 2014, he met with Kendrick again. Producer Sounwave explains.
- Sounwave: Alright for Pharrell usually with us, there’s two meetings with Pharrell. There’s the beginning, and then the end. It’s like we would go to Pharrell to get that little kick creatively, because Pharrell’s one of those guys who still to this day is going to sit down with you, bring out his keyboard, play notes that is going to blow your head away and actually create the beat with you right there in front of you.
- So Pharrell’s playing beats. Kendrick is starting to write to them, right there in the room. Then, at one point, during that meeting, a record executive named Sam Taylor, who worked for Sony Music at the time, took Sounwave aside.
- Sounwave: He plays it for Dot, Dot stopped everything he was doing and starts to write to “Alright.” The situation with Alright was, it was super amazing, super fitting, sonically it was not, like no matter what we did, it just could not fit with the rest of the album. But we loved that record so much that I said, okay I’m not letting this record die. I literally have to go back in, last second of the album, like literally at the crunch time, I think we had one more day, and added drums to it.
- That same day, Sounwave brought in another member of To Pimp a Butterfly’s core production team, Terrace Martin, to add a sax part to the song.
- Sounwave: He gave us a lot more sax part. So we just had to pick and choose. But it was literally freaking out like this record has to make it. And I just remember about three hours, just me and Terrace locked in that room. We came out, I said I think we got something. We played it for Kendrick. And I just remember him, his eyes lit up. It was like, we did it. This is finally it.
About The Big Hit Show
The Big Hit Show is produced by Obama’s Higher Ground Productions banner and Spotify —a series of documentaries on the pieces of popular culture that have defined the Internet era and changed American culture. Journalist Alex Pappademas takes us on an epic journey that spans genres, mediums and generations to explore what happens when a wildly successful piece of pop culture gets so big that it changes the world. This current chapter analyzes the context and impact Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy award-winning album To Pimp A Butterfly had on society, by dissecting Kendrick’s thought process and experiences that led to this pivotal moment in his career. Throughout this experience, he emerges as a cultural leader, superstar, and black man above everything else.
source: dkcnews.com
