Comparng kendrick lamar albums11/20/2022 ![]() ![]() They’ve chosen someone both at the top of his game and at the forefront of a post-Ferguson renaissance in righteously angry, politically engaged black music that genuinely bears comparison to soul music’s revered early 1970s golden era. ![]() Still, if you were going to pick a contemporary pop artist to storm the Pulitzer’s barricades, Lamar is an obvious choice. This year’s award hasn’t gone to some rarefied piece of electronica with classical pretensions, but to a double platinum-selling hip-hop album by an artist who packs out arena venues. This clearly makes Kendrick Lamar’s achievement all the more striking in its break with the prize’s dusty traditions. Lamar has proved it’s possible to make a huge mainstream impact with music that never panders to the lowest common denominator. The official announcement of the new policy involved everything but: “The contemporary classical symphony to jazz, opera, choral, musical theatre, movie scores and other forms of musical excellence.” Even so, there was no mention of pop music in their idea of what constituted “distinguished American musical compositions”. In 2004, then Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said they would be “broadening the prize a bit” so it could be awarded to music not from the European classical tradition it no longer became obligatory for entrants to submit a score. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1996 that an African American, George Walker, won the prize itself. But the Pulitzer board refused to give out the award. ![]() Not, one would have imagined, a particularly controversial decision: by 1965, Ellington was rightly regarded as a straight-up, no-further-questions genius who had elevated jazz to an orchestral art form worthy of comparison with more “respectable” musical genres decades before. The most celebrated example of its snobbery may have come in 1965, when the jury decided that no current music was worthy of an award, and attempted instead to give a special citation to Duke Ellington, in recognition of the groundbreaking body of work he had amassed over the preceding 50 years. Then again, the Pulitzer has a longstanding reputation for being quite extraordinarily stuffy. Ornette Coleman, the only previous non-classical winner. In its history, there have only been three jazz winners: Wynton Marsalis in 1997, Ornette Coleman in 2006, and Henry Threadgill in 2016. They gave an “additional citation” to Bob Dylan in 2008, and to Hank Williams in 2010 – a mere 57 years after the latter’s death – but the prize itself has remained almost exclusively the domain of classical music. Clearly no one expected an august institution like the Pulitzer to start handing out gongs to the Backstreet Boys or Mötley Crüe, but the notion that not a single work by any American pop artist over the last seven decades has been thought worthy is mind-boggling. It has been 60 years since the birth of modern pop music, a period of time during which said modern pop music has established itself, in its multifarious configurations, as being an unquestionably important art form. Perhaps the most obvious question provoked by the news that Kendrick Lamar has been awarded the Pulitzer prize for music for his 2017 album Damn is not “why?” but rather “what took you so long?” ![]()
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