The New Yorker:

When Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music, on Monday, he also became the first non-jazz or classical artist to collect that honor in its seventy-five-year existence. (“There’s a Pulitzer for music?” was, unfortunately, the early refrain on social media.) That Lamar was born and raised in Compton, California, and writes deft and nimble rap songs about systemic injustice, made the announcement especially thrilling. It felt like a decisive dismantling of fusty ideas about high and low art and, especially, who gets to claim genius as his own. As my colleague Doreen St. Félix wrote, “The Pulitzers got it right.”

Following the announcement, the Pulitzer board was immediately hoorayed for its “relevance,” 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.

It wasn’t so much the board’s recognition of Lamar’s Zeitgeist-consistent insurgency that got everyone riled up; the organization has honored subversive artists before, including some who have adroitly (though perhaps not quite as explicitly) captured “the complexity of modern African-American life.” But this time, the board also chose to commend a musician working in a popular, vital idiom, and not just any idiom, but hip-hop, a genre that has been unapologetic if not brazen about its own profitability. 

Go to link