We Gon be Alright
The section of this video most relevant
to black death is the ending. In the last section of the video, Lamar rises to
the top of a light pole in downtown Los Angeles. A police officer pulls up,
first taking out his gun. Then, instead of raising his gun, he raises up a
gun-like hand gesture, and emblematically shoots Lamar off the pole. Lamar
falls to the ground slowly, eventually making impact, then after a second passes,
opens his eyes and smiles at the camera, giving the audience assurance that
everything will be alright. In her piece, Holloway describes “black death” as
being so engrained in African American culture that it is iconic. She writes, “…the
cycles of our daily lives were so persistently interrupted by specters of death
that we work this experience into the culture’s iconography and included it as
an aspect of black culture sensibility” (6). Lamar’s video of “Alright”
furthers this point because black death is so embedded in African American
culture that he did not even have to die a real death for the audience of the
video to know what had happened.
Lamar also
embodies black death by the way in which he “dies”. As he stands upon the light
pole, he is shot down by a white cop. As Holloway emphasizes throughout her
piece, one of the ways how black
death happens is at the hands of police violence (57). Lamar directly references
this police violence when he raps, “Wouldn’t you know / We been hurt, been down
before / Nigga, when our pride was low / Lookin’ at the world like ‘Where do we
go?’ / Nigga, and we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho’”
(Alright, 2015). Finally, Lamar’s purposeful placement of his video in Los
Angeles references the infamous difficulties between the LAPD and African
Americans, that even Holloway refers to (76). Between the placement of his “death”
and the rhetoric in how he dies, his
video certainly encapsulates and exemplifies black death.
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