Everything's Gonna Be Alright

So what do you do when your breakthrough hit is a sex anthem and your follow-up is one of the most unflinching portraits of poverty and despair in the history of hip-hop? If the song is the single released after O.P.P. it seems it gets overshadowed and forgotten. "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" is a great Naughty by Nature single that never made the impact it should have made.

Did you even remember "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" exists?   It landed at number 53 on the Billboard Hot 100, which sounds respectable until you remember what it came after. For a follow-up to a top-ten smash, that’s practically a disappearing act. It was the second single from the group's first self-titled album in 1991. It seems like the timing would have been perfect to build off of the success of O.P.P., but it was completely overshadowed and overlooked instead.

If you asked music fans about Naughty by Nature, I think most of them would tell you they have three songs. There's O.P.P. of course and then Hip Hop Hooray and Feel me Flow. All three are remembered as very good and very fun, but many would struggle to name a fourth Naughty by Nature song.

Here's what you may not realize when you listen to "Everyhings Gonna Be Alright." Based on the song's title and an upbeat vibe sampling "I'll Take You There" by the Staple Singers , you'd think this was an inspirational anthem. However, the title is one of the great pieces of misdirection in rap history.

Treach’s performance on "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" is one of the most undervalued vocal deliveries of the entire era. The playful, nimble Treach of “O.P.P.” doesn't show up on this track. This is something different, but equally impressive. It's a first person account of growing up poor in the projects. This is someone rapping with relentless intensity that makes you feel like every word has been earned through experience.

The specificity is what makes it feel so lived. Rejected from a job because of his hair. Thrown out by a mother who couldn’t afford to keep him. Turning to crime not as a lifestyle choice out of necessity. Not exactly the upbeat song it appears to be, but the contrast is doing some amazing work.

The song holds up well today with the exception of one f-word (not that f-word, the other f-word). The themes are certainly as real as they were 35 years ago. So why doesn’t anyone talk about it? Part of it is the cultural collective memory. “O.P.P.” was so massive, so inescapable, that it became the thing people remember about this era of Naughty by Nature. The fun single ate the serious one alive. That tends to happen more than we realize. A band’s biggest song becomes a lens that distorts everything around it and the deeper work gets filed under “filler song” in the collective mind even when it’s objectively more accomplished.

What do we think kept this song from completely blowing up? Part of it is that the song is genuinely hard to sit with. There’s no chorus that gives you a break. No moment where the mood lifts and you get to exhale. The title keeps repeating that everything’s gonna be alright even while the verses keep proving it won’t be. It’s a loop of false comfort over hopelessness and sustaining that tension can be an uncomfortable experience. This song doesn’t offer any comfort no matter what the title says. That’s the whole point.

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Did this one hit you differently than you expected? Have you been carrying it for years, waiting for someone to say it out loud? Drop your take below and tell us which hip-hop deep cuts you think deserve this treatment next.

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