A bright spot on an otherwise bleak album, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” instantly feels necessary. Besides being the most celebratory jam on To Pimp a Butterfly, it’s a modern-day liberation anthem. It’s that first salvational gasp after nearly drowning. Yet, for such a happy song, “Alright” is innately sad. By design, it’s supposed to be some sort of salve for the pain of losing Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and others, and for white supremacy. At the same time, it’s a reminder of everything that hurts. Saying we’ll be fine, as Kendrick suggests, is a choice borne of necessity, a mandatory joy and survival tactic that so many black people are compelled into. We seek music to heal the sickness. So we made “Alright” our Song of the Summer because it’s great and, in some ways, ’cause we had no choice.
There’s no telling which single on an album will truly move people. What makes “Alright” so powerful is how it became Our Song—in part, by merely existing. That there was no other song like it—meaning no collective anthem from which we all could draw hope—is part of what makes it great. I’m not the first person to call it a new black anthem. That happened fast and with certainty, though I wouldn’t go so far as to have it replace “We Shall Overcome.” If there were any magical record label tricks involved with its push, then we didn’t see it. The elevation seemed to be largely organic to the point where we—black people, separately and together—just decided that this was our jam.
Pre-summer, “Trap Queen” and “Uptown Funk” were high up in the Song of the Summer predictions, which has become more of a music critic pastime than anything meaningful. Last summer, the soundtrack was widely considered to be “Fancy,” a terrible song that’s also a perfect pop record. Leading up to Labor Day, people who care about these things either start christening the Song of the Summer, mourning the dearth of candidates or lamenting another summer without a clear-cut ubiquitous anthem (Huffington Post has already declared the Song of the Summer dead, bless its heart).
This year, the top contender isn’t as blatant. The Song of the Summer should technically be one that dominates in real life and market wise, on radio and charts. But as history goes, that’s not always the case (in my heart, the song of summer ’96 will always be Ghost Town DJs’ “My Boo,” not “Macarena”). It seemed like Wiz Khalifa would rule our existence with the sickening “See You Again,” and so far he has. His song is currently No. 1 on Billboard’s summer songs chart ahead of an even more nauseating single, Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” These all pale in comparison to the power of “Alright,” the one song that we can all agree is the most important of the summer, one that bangs and delivers—maybe not universally, but to a group of people who matter majorly.