The sound of Kendrick Lamar’s Alright rang out like a clarion call this year, from clubs, cars and house parties to police harassment protests. With prevalent, uncompromising lyrics like “Nigga, and we hate po-po/Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho,” the standout moment of To Pimp a Butterfly was quickly established as the year’s definitive political anthem.
In the months following Killer Mike’s impassioned pre-show speech that went viral after the Ferguson grand jury decision in 2014, discussion of US race relations in popular culture has amplified, with many artists politicising their music with renewed urgency. To Pimp a Butterfly was a visceral outpouring of this pain, which, in some cases, provided the language in which to fight back. It’s an album that uses nuance to deal with complex emotion , and its humour rewrites the mono-narrative of the NWA-era angry black male. That the hip-hop group’s biopic Straight Outta Compton came out in August affirmed the timelessness of these issues.
It was, however, D’Angelo’s release of Black Messiah at the end of 2014 that ignited an explosion of musically charged revolts. The album carefully moves between uncontrolled rage and considered production; a political shift for the artist, who wrote many of its tracks as a reaction to watching the Ferguson protests. His first album in 14 years touched on themes of systemic racism (1,000 deaths) and structural power (The Charade) through country funk, silky R&B and metronomic basslines.
The rest of 2015 was punctuated with tracks that sparked conversation and raised awareness of victims of racist attacks, giving voices of dissonance a beat. Dev Hynes’ Sandra’s Smile, a delicate and melancholic retort, provided an accompaniment to the online fury, confusion and questions following Sandra Bland’s death while in Texas police custody in July. This Ends Today by the family members of Eric Garner, opens with audio of Garner shouting the words “I can’t breathe” – a phrase now synonymous with the Black Lives Matter campaign in the US, and borrowed by Pussy Riot for their 2015 single I Can’t Breathe.
One of the year’s most powerful contributions came courtesy of Janelle Monáe’s resonating Hell You Talmbout, an electrifying track which name-checks young black Americans who have been killed by police officers, including Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Emmett Till. It’s an uncompromising, in-your-face anthem, with the maniacal anaphoric demand to “say his name” over and over again and delivered in an almost exasperated defiance. Monae reminds us that sometimes we need to keep making our point to make our point.
There were also non-musical contributions from major artists that made the world take notice, from Beyoncé and Jay Z paying bail for some of the Baltimore protesters, to Prince releasing rare footage of the Rally for Peace show in Baltimore. While A$AP Rocky’s comments in April raised awareness of the “fucked-up shit that people do in the States,” his album, At.Long.Last reinforced the point that black men can have a stake in fashion and culture. Kanye meanwhile took an opportunity at the VMAs to declare that he’ll be running for president in 2020. For him at least, it seems like not much has changed since 2006 when he famously declared that the then president, George W Bush, didn’t care enough to help black people.
It was, however, Alright that set the agenda this year. It was the protest song for a generation of people tired of not being heard. Alright is a force unto itself, racked with pain and emotion and euphoria. Its hopefulness and threat to the establishment is what makes it so thrilling when heard out of car windows and in DJ sets. Its powerful message assures that while the majority of black contributions don’t make the history books, Lamar’s work hopefully will.
For many of these artists, music was the only way that they could could process the pain of 2015 and, as a result, it was the year when one of the greatest protest anthems was born. It’s not the critics who have the last word, however, but the stories of the victims who have inspired the music. As the crowds chanted “We gon’ be alright/Nigga, we gon’ be alright!” at the Cleveland Black Lives Matter conference in July, you wonder how much it’s going take before this generation really believes it.
