Darius Brown

ENGL282

Danielle Griffin

12/11/2016

We gon be Alright

Last year Compton, California rapper Kendrick Lamar released his third album, To Pimp

a Butterfly. The album tackled many relevant issues that plague African American communities

and people across the country. The single Alright was one of the songs that had a direct positive

message to people during a time where tensions between African Americans and the Police were

rising due to recent deaths of multiple individuals. The songs hook We gon be alright became

the reassuring phrase for the African American community during these tense times as a means

for instilling hope. One of the most prominent users of this song were members of the Black

Lives Matter movement. In July of 2015, students from Cleveland State University were leaving

a Black Lives Matter conference when an altercation with the police occurred prompting

protesters to start chanting we gon be alright. But interestingly enough, it wasnt the song but

the music video for the song that grabbed the attention of other groups and individuals struggling

with their own issues. By using rhetorical scenes and filming mechanics Kendrick Lamar uses

the music video for the song Alright to widen its appeal and adaptability to any type of adversity

people are facing, while also reinforcing its original message.

Classical Rhetorical theorist, Aristotle, created the rhetorical appeals of pathos, the appeal

to emotions, ethos, the appeal to ones character, and logos, the appeal to logic (Bizzell and

Herzberg, pg. 213). The most prevalent of the three appeals in this video and ultimately

Kendrick Lamars main tool, is pathos. Kendrick Lamar targets general emotions that the
audience can easily apply to their own situations. This in turn also gets the audience to

understand his own message about Police brutality. Just as Aristotle said in regards to emotions,

the Orator must put his audience in the right frame of mind (Bizzell and Herzberg, pg. 213).

One of the many components in the music video Kendrick Lamar uses to reach more

people is by appealing to their emotions through color scheme. In order for the viewer to fully

understanding the argument hes making, the video in its entirety is done in darker colors like

black and various shades of gray. These types of colors usually provoke negative feelings like

anger, hostility, and aggression, all of which reflect the atmosphere of emotions that certain

individuals feel on the topic of Police Killings and brutality (Valdez and Mehrabian, pg. 407-

408). Overall the emotions these colors are linked to are negative emotions, which Kendrick

Lamar uses not only to reflect the emotions that he and others feel, but also to establish an

underlying base of negative emotions. The actual song is an upbeat, fast pace and highly

positive song. This creates a contradiction because when the song cuts on your looking at

visuals with this color scheme thats provoking the exact opposite emotions that the song is

making you feel. This dynamic directly reflects Lamars message, in that during the bad times

you must still be positive and have hope that you are going to be alright. When people witness

this dynamic it also helps them understand the message because it allows them to identify with

emotions the message is trying to portray through the association issues that make them feel the

same way when seeing those colors.

Color scheme is not the only way in which Kendrick Lamar appeals to the audience

emotions. He also dually uses multiple images and scenes to appeal to the audiences emotions

while subtly reinforcing the, we gon be alright message. The progression of images and

scenes in the video start from bad to good. In the first couple minutes of the video before the
song cuts on, we are shown images of sad wrinkled faces staring into the camera, people

fighting, and what looks like people rioting and starting fires, all while Kendrick Lamar is

reading a somber poem about his struggles. These first images are meant to bring the viewers

emotions down to convey just how bad things feel right now. The peak of this negative sequence

is the scene that follows where we see an African American man being put in handcuffs by the

police but breaks free and starts running away. Immediately the officer draws his weapon and

the camera begins to a focus and do a close up on the officer holding the gun up. At this angle,

its as if the officer is aiming at a person next to you. The scene slows down then the officer

fires the gun and the bullet begins to travel off screen. The eerily silence, the gun almost drawn

at you, and the loud gunshot all creates the last emotion Kendrick wants the audience to feel

before the song starts, which is fear. On top of all the anger and grief of past events there exist a

fear among minorities when it comes to interactions with the Police. A fear that it can happen or

will happen to them. At this point in the video Kendrick has made his audience feel exactly what

many others feel like, even the ones that dont or cant necessarily identify with the experiences

hes talking about. Hes strategically doing this because if people cant understand the

experience that hes describing, they still can understand the emotions that come from it, which

can appeal to a much wider audience.

Once the actual song begins in the video multiple scenes resonate positivity and

Kendricks message. First, the video switches between two scenes, the first one depicting

Kendrick in a car with a child in the passenger seat throwing money, while doing donuts around

a police car that has three kids dancing on top of the hood, roof, and trunk. The second scene

shows Kendrick moving but the camera pans out and shows that hes actually off the ground

floating and smiling. The message comes full and clear with these images as the first scene lets
people know that despite the things going on with the police everything is going to be alright.

The second scene reinforces that message and makes it more general as Kendrick shows people

they too will be above their problems soon. Most notably with the other images that follow is

that theyre all of people smiling and dancing. Even the audience still feels some slight negative

emotions due to the color scheme, the images and the music provide nothing but good feelings

which strengthens Alrights message because this is a realistic interpretation of life, meaning that

no matter what you will encounter obstacles in life and have to endure certain struggles but the

only way to overcome those obstacles is to stay positive. This is also shown in the various

scenes of dancers. Whereas before we say images of civilians either sad or angry, when the

music starts we see scenes of people dancing in front of a wall of speakers and the people we see

in the street with Kendrick are all smiling and dancing to the song despite whatever theyre

struggling with.

The final scene of the video brings the overarching message full circle as it depicts

Kendrick high up on top of a street lamp outside of a city still singing the song, until an officer

pulls up, gets out of the car with a shotgun, but instead slowly points his fingers in the form of

gun up at Kendrick and makes a shooting motion. Kendrick is actually shot and we watch him

fall to the ground in slow motion. Once he hits the ground though he smiles at the camera. This

is the most important scene because it serves multiple purposes in regards to the message of the

video. By standing up high on the lamp post high in the sky the meaning behind that image

widens the songs message to successful people because its telling them that even someone who

has reached the high level of success that hes reach, they can fall victim to the same type of

brutality they might experience in their normal life but also remember itll be alright in the end.

This is a way of widening his audience to people who have reached a high level of success and
reminding them, with the help of the officer using his fingers instead of his gun, how easy it is

for something like this to happen to them. Secondly, Kendrick is also showing us that he

believes he can fall victim to these issues and even if something were to happen to Kendrick

Lamar, one of the worlds biggest artist, it would be ok because everything will be alright.

Charles Stewart describes the functional approaches view of rhetoric as the agency

through which social movements perform essential functions. (Stewart 153) Those essential

functions are mobilization, exercise of external influence and resistance to counter-influence.

The alright music video accomplishes two of these functions, mobilization and resistance to

counter-influence. Mobilization is the is attracting, maintaining, and molding followers into a

unit. The music video plays a role in that process by attracting followers of the message. As

discussed before the music video uses visual techniques and scenes to subtly attract more

individuals to follow Kendricks message. Secondly, resistance to counter influence, which is

basically is reacting to the resistance from a larger structure. From the video the hook, We gon

be alright has been used in different situations by different people as a push back on their

counterparts efforts to stop them. This concept and the adaptability of the music videos

message is best shown in its use during the 2016 United States Presidential election. This past

March at a Donald Trump rally in Chicago that was cancelled, protesters began to chant we gon

be alright in celebration (C.M.). Displaying a great example of what Kerran Sanger stated in

Functions of Freedom Singing in the Civil Rights Movement: The Activists Implicit Rhetorical

Theory. She mentioned that, Activists described themselves as turning to song when they

were so overwhelmed by emotion that speaking seemed not to fulfill their desire to

communicate. (Sanger 184) Whether the emotions are for celebration or for uniting, Kendricks
Alright has become the one of the freedom songs for all types of issues for people in todays

society.

Since the slavery days where slaves used song to communicate with other slaves, to the

Civil Rights Movement where songs were used for protest. Freedom songs as a form of

expression of widespread struggle has continued to be a prominent tool for African Americans

even till today as seen with the use of the videos main message in recent protest by the Black

Lives Matter social movement. But through Kendrick Lamars use of visual techniques, strong

rhetorical imagery, and scenes, he is able to widen his audience for his message by creating a

message that can be relatable and adapted by virtually all individuals. The power of this

message and the effectiveness of the mechanisms used in the video are most clearly shown in the

use of song in various recent protest by different groups of people for different causes and the

wide range of individuals the song could have a special meaning for. Analyzing the rhetorical

workings of this music video gives us an understanding of how exactly members of the African

American community feel when it comes to dealing with police brutality and also how

persuasion through empathy can be employed using various visuals in music videos in order to

move the audience from one viewpoint to another.

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