Rap proves it’s the pop idiom of our time
With Lamar’s win, our definition of great music has just become more flexible, writes Chris Richards
DAMN for real. Kendrick Lamar just won the Pulitzer Prize for music. What does it mean? So many things. First, it confirms that these strange days have been blindingly golden for black pop culture. Black Panther just made history at the box office, Beyoncé just made history at Coachella and on Monday, one of the leading candidates for Voice of His Generation made history by winning a medal that has only ever hung across the hearts of classical and jazz musicians.
Here’s what else it means: that rap music is the most significant pop idiom of our time. It’s the sound of 21st century American life – a black art form with a blackand-white-and-everyone-else audience. The music is an implicit conversation about the conjoined legacies of slavery, segregation, police brutality and other hideous injustices that our society doesn’t care to solve. In that sense, rap music is the sound of a broken nation struggling to understand itself. Lamar understands that. Whenever he darts off into a virtuoso verse, he isn’t trying to dizzy our ears as much as vocalise his own hyperawareness to the state of the nation in real time.
On Damn, his astonishing 2017 album, he surveys a smoking landscape and lets the disappointment bounce off his tongue: “It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets, Wall Street, corporate offices, banks, employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts.” In a profoundly disorienting American moment, here was a rap album that sounded clear-eyed and sure-footed. It earned the 30-year-old his first Pulitzer.
Let’s not forget that Damn didn’t win album of the year at the Grammy Awards in February – the Recording Academy has only bestowed its coveted trophy to a rap album once. The loss marked Lamar’s third consecutive snub for album of the year and it was enough to make you wonder why an industry that profits so handsomely from black art so adamantly refuses to celebrate it.
Some awards mean more than others, though, and while prestige often tends to calcify our ideas about what constitutes greatness, the Pulitzer committee has stepped up to recognise Lamar’s work. In doing so, our shared definition of “great music” becomes more flexible.
Maybe Lamar knew that all along. He’s always courted prestige, when his To Pimp a Butterfly was nominated for album of the year at the 2016 Grammys, he had no qualms asking to be recognised by the powers that be.
“Ultimately, for the hip hop community, I would love for us to win them all,” Lamar told the New York Times about the nine prizes he had been nominated for that year. “Because we deserve that.”
Truth is, he deserved better. – The Washington Post