Last Tuesday, Kendrick Lamar shared the new black and white video for his track “Alright”, which also includes a brand new verse from Lamar, directed by Collin Tilley. Tilley recently sat down for an interview with MTV to unpack the meaning behind the video. Tilley discusses the origins of the ideas, especially in the introduction which sees Lamar, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock being carried away by police officers.
While Tilley and Lamar were discussing the imagery of having cops carry the car, Lamar made some music up on the spot for the scene, according to Tilley. “All of a sudden, Kendrick was like ‘Hold on, man. I’m totally hearing something completely different for this right now’. He’s like, ‘I’m gonna write this song and we’ll send it to you tonight. But we’ll do this song as a segment before the video even starts’. So, they sent me the song like two days later and we continued to build on it”, Tilley mentioned.
Tilley also discusses the symbolism within the video and the meaning between Lamar’s smile at the end: “Well, you know, it’s all a dream world. So, he’s really saying, ‘everything is still gonna be alright’. At the end, really, when he smiled, we were all playing around with the fact that we should just have the chorus come back like, ‘we gon’ be alright!’, but then it would have just kept going. But like I said, it’s really all about the positivity”. You can read the full interview here.
#Peace.Love.Alright
