Kendrick's voice has nearly failed him on "Alright". It's reduced to a scraping wheeze from too many shows, too many studio takes, too many verses, and you can nearly hear his throat closing protectively around his vocal cords. It gives his performance a ragged, desperate, strangely exultant edge, a dark energy that courses all through To Pimp a Butterfly, an album about battling demons to locate your higher purpose.

The song has become a flashpoint in the best possible sense: When Lamar performed it onstage this week at the BET Awards, he planted himself atop a vandalized cop car. It prompted bellows of irredeemable idiocy from people paid to spout it, and it also located the song's hard, hopeful energy in the seething present moment. It is the anthem of determination and persistence on an album that seems to eat itself alive with doubt and depression as it plays. Kendrick sounds like a fighter, one who has already fought harder than he imagined possible. And then Pharrell, ageless, his voice as boyish and guileless as ever, offers us a truth: "we gon' be alright." He doesn't sound naive or even particularly convinced: He is repeating it, firmly and calmly.

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