Most of the discussion I’ve seen online about Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music has been celebratory, which is as it should be.
Despite several years during which Lamar has commandingly bestrode the triangulation of music that is great, important, and popular, recognition of his work from a body as august as the Pulitzer committee—which has only given a couple of its prizes to what you might call colloquial forms of music in its 75-year history (they didn’t even recognize jazz until Wynton Marsalis’s Blood in the Fields in 1997)—feels like a big deal.
But to whom, or to what is the deal bigger? Is it more significant that an historically stuffy cultural institution is acknowledging the by now very old news that hiphop is an essential artistic form, or that an overtly political, chart-topping, brazenly black-life-centric record by a big star gained the same high-end imprimatur awarded to poets, novelists, and serious journalists? Opinions differ wildly, united in general by elation that DAMN. is getting recognized by people who aren’t attuned to popular music.
The NY Times offer a round table that looks back, among other things, at other records that should have and could have won the prize sooner (including To Pimp a Butterfly).
Huffington Post has a piece that argues DAMN. won a prize most closely associated with journalism because journalism is exactly what it is, reiterating Public Enemy’s oft-repeated line about rap being the CNN of black America.
CNN itself makes the case that the award is a specifically anti-Trump gesture.
The Atlantic takes the position that however excellent the record is, the prize is part of a shell game designed to keep the Pulitzers seem more in touch—“it almost feels as though the Pulitzers won a Kendrick Lamar, and not the other way around.”
Lots of people have mentioned Bob Dylan’s having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 as a precedent, which is fair enough. But it’s worth remembering that win came after 50 years of Dylan’s institutionalization as the living embodiment of the infusion of poetry and substance into popular music.
Lamar is 30 years old.
Anyway, these are all interesting reads, and all worth some time if you have it. Two New Yorker pieces may constitute your best one-stop, however. Doreen St. Felix’s article covers a lot of the ground referenced above, and offers shrewd analysis of the apparent contradictions:
“I would argue that the award is a bigger event for the Pulitzers than it is for Lamar, or for hip-hop’s morale,” she writes. “Most glaringly, it sets the stage for the argument that the prize of the intelligentsia, which has been disinterested in the flow of popular music, may have a shrewder grasp on cultural impact than the Grammys, which for its top honor, Album of the Year, have snubbed not only Lamar—this year and in the past—but every other black hip-hop artist other than Lauryn Hill and OutKast.
“I certainly did not expect the Pulitzers to be what finally proved the Grammys irrelevant. David Hajdu, a critic at The Nation and one of the Pulitzer jurors, told [NY Times writer Joe] Coscarelli that recognizing DAMN. meant recognizing that rap ‘has value on its own terms and not just as a resource for use in a field that is more broadly recognized by the institutional establishment as serious or legitimate.’ Rap has not primarily depended on the recognition of traditional bodies to flourish and to change. It’ll be fun to hear how Lamar finesses a verse to include the word ‘Pulitzer.'”
Meanwhile, Amanda Petrusich’s short companion piece focuses on the conflicted meaning of the word that has attended this story more than any other:
“Following the announcement, the Pulitzer board was immediately hoorayed for its ‘relevance,'” she writes, “as if relevance itself is a virtue. Perhaps it is. But I fear that calling Lamar simply a relevant choice comes too close to diminishing his deep expertise.”
