Yes, Kendrick deserved it
Kendrick Lamar has won the Pulitzer Prize for Music — but why for this album?
Kendrick Lamar’s had a great couple of years. The Compton, California, native is one of the most celebrated rappers on earth — topping charts, winning awards, being fawned over by everyone from Barack Obama to Taylor Swift and receiving critical acclaim for pretty much everything he does. His 2015 hit Alright has been used as protest music (at a #BlackLivesMatter rally) and was infamously (mis)quoted by our then minister of finance Malusi Gigaba in his February budget speech (“We gon’ be right!” he declared, baffling those in parliament and instantly becoming a Twitter meme).
The album from which that track came, To Pimp a Butterfly, is Lamar’s masterpiece. His Blood on the Tracks, his Dark Side of the Moon. I am certain he will never reach the heights of its brilliance again. Lamar knew this because when he released its follow-up, 2017’s DAMN, it was clear he wasn’t trying to recreate its predecessor. DAMN was more loose, less structured, both more experimental and less boundary-pushing. It was great, but not brilliant. But Lamar didn’t need to prove himself any more — his genius is almost universally accepted by music critics and fans. So it’s like he had decided to take his foot off the accelerator a bit and was cruising instead.
It’s interesting, then, that DAMN is the album that won Kendrick Lamar the Pulitzer Prize for Music. It’s the first nonclassical or jazz record in the prize’s 75year history to win. The prize’s website describes the album in the most pretentious way possible:
“... a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.
That description would be more fitting for the heavily sociopolitical and unapologetically black To Pimp a Butterfly — so why didn’t the Pulitzers recognise him then? In an interview with Billboard, prize administrator Dana Canedy (herself a previous winner, but in journalism) said while Lamar had been on the jury’s radar for years, “this just seems like the right moment”.
It’s a big deal that a rap album becomes the first “mainstream” or “modern” album to win a Pulitzer — and no one in rap is more deserving than Lamar. In fact, few artists in mainstream music today deserve this as much as he does. He’s a brilliant lyricist with an incredible flow; he raps about politics and society as much as he raps about ass. He represents Black Excellence and Millennial Excellence — and all on his own terms. He does whatever he wants, however he wants to do it.
So while this is a huge win for Lamar and hiphop, neither needed a nod of approval from the Pulitzer jury. Millennials have always known that Kendrick Lamar aka Kung Fu Kenny aka K-Dot is one of the most talented musicians working today. For the first time, rap music has surpassed rock to become the biggest-selling music genre in America.
Modern rap can be intelligent, boundarypushing, experimental and brilliant. We know this. It’s about time others acknowledged it. The win is a clever decision by the Pulitzer jury because it makes the prize relevant to a generation who don’t care much for the approval of old institutions and older generations.
Wonder who’s getting next year’s one, then? Bieber?