The song “Alright” by Rapper Kendick Lamar hits on many political issues, but the main one you take away from the music video is Police brutality. 

In the start of the video you can see there are video clips of innocent black men being arrested, shot at, or even being brutally beat up. This is all to show just how bad the criminal justice system is for people of colour in the US. The video is also all in black and white which portrays the message of what is going on is Black vs White and the issue in the country is black and white, as in it is very obvious what is going on, and no one is trying to fix it.

While you are seeing the videos and pictures of these awful things happening to African Americans, you have kendrick Lamar in the background telling a story and talking to audience just explaining what he is going through. 

With the song being called “Alright”, it is trying to get across the message that it is all going to be alright. Essentially saying that “we” as in African Americans are going to get through this and be alright. And by get through this he means, the mistreatment of African Americans in the US. Kendrick Lamar sees this video/song as a “fuck you to the police” and things need to change. This is heard in the video when he says the lyric “when we hate popo, they gonna kill us in the street fosho”. While this lyric is being said you can see kendrick Lamar on top of his car being chased by police officers around a parking Lot. 

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Bibliography

Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson. “MUSIC VIDEO IN BLACK AND WHITE: RACE AND FEMININITY.” In Music Video and the Politics of Representation, 87–107. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r1zr6.8.

Lamar, Kendrick. “Kendrick Lamar – Alright.” Www.youtube.com, 30 June 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY&ab_channel=KendrickLamarVEVO.