Alright
From an album that Lamar recorded as a meditation on Black identity post-Ferguson. The song became the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement after protesters chanted it outside the Republican National Convention. The video depicts Lamar floating above Los Angeles.
Proved that protest music was alive in the streaming era. Became the anthem of a civil rights movement in real time — the most significant union of a pop song and a social movement since the 1960s.
Released in 2015, the year after Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed by police. The Black Lives Matter movement was organizing nationally. Lamar was simultaneously the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful rapper alive.
The shift from physical to digital reshaped how music is produced, distributed, and consumed.