“Don’t Don’t Do It” [ft. Kendrick Lamar]

Last September, 43-year-old Keith Scott was shot and killed by police in Charlotte, NC, while waiting to pick his child up from the school bus. Scott, a black man with a pre-existing traumatic brain injury, was fired on after allegedly refusing to comply with police demands to drop a weapon. In a video of the incident, shot by Scott’s wife, she can be heard explaining his injury and later yelling, “Don’t do it.” N.E.R.D.’s new single from No_One Ever Really Dies—the Kendrick Lamar-featuring “Don’t Don’t Do It!”—recounts the Scott shooting, from standoff to discharge: Ambitious, stark, and hauntingly affecting, the song leans into these tensions.

“Don’t Don’t Do It!” opens amid luminescent keyboards and soft, groovy drums, then accelerates quickly—first into a serene, guitar-laden narration of events, then something more menacing, as if to approximate the escalation of Scott’s situation. In kind, Pharrell’s hook and introductory verse relive Scott’s death and his wife’s last attempts to save her husband. The urgency is palpable. What starts as Scott’s story widens to include police brutality in Ferguson (Mike Brown), Baltimore (Freddie Grey), Cleveland (Tamir Rice), Baton Rouge (Alton Sterling), and other cities across the country. “They’re gonna do it anyway!” Pharrell chants as guitars crunch around him, echoing the inevitability of Scott’s situation, and so many others like him. Kendrick zooms out even further to analyze a militarized police force, his manic verse expanding and contracting: “Niggas, same rules, same chalk/Different decade, same law/Keep focus, you wanna get caught with your eyes open,” he raps. “Don’t Don’t Do It!” is the most powerful, purposeful song off N.E.R.D.’s album thus far, a statement of beauty born from chaos and tragedy.