Kendrick Lamar shakes up the Pulitzer game

NEW YORK

In late January, the Compton, California, rapper Kendrick Lamar lost the Grammy Award for album of the year to Bruno Mars. “DAMN”, Lamar’s fourth LP, was his third straight to be nominated but ultimately fall short of the trophy, considered by most to be the top prize in popular music.

But perhaps not anymore.

AWARD

On Monday, Lamar’s “DAMN” took home an even more elusive honour, one that may never have even seemed within reach: the Pulitzer Prize for music. Lamar is not only the first rapper to win the award since the Pulitzers expanded to music in 1943, but he is also the first winner who is not a classical or jazz musician.

“The time was right,” Dana Canedy, the administrator of the prizes, said in an interview after the winners were announced. “We are very proud of this selection. It means that the jury and the board judging system worked as it’s supposed to — the best work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.”

She added: “It shines a light on hip-hop in a completely different way. This is a big moment for hip-hop music and a big moment for the Pulitzers.”

Lamar was not immediately available to comment on his win. But Terrence Henderson, the record executive known as Punch from Lamar’s label, Top Dawg Entertainment, acknowledged the achievement on Twitter, writing that from now on, no one should “speak with anything less than respect in your mouth for Kendrick Lamar.”

DEEP MUSIC

Ms Canedy said the board’s decision to award Lamar, 30, was unanimous. The board called the album “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

“DAMN”, which featured Rihanna and U2, along with kinetic production from Sounwave and Mike WiLL Made-It, topped the charts and was among last year’s most-streamed albums, while also tackling thorny issues both personal and political, including race, faith and the burdens of commercial success. Though his work is often serious — and searing — Lamar, a dense and bruising lyricist, has managed to become a pop-cultural juggernaut as well, performing during halftime of this year’s college football national championship and overseeing the soundtrack for “Black Panther.”

SELECTION

The music finalists, selected by a five-person jury and then presented to the board for a winner selection, also included the composer Michael Gilbertson’s “Quartet” and the singer and composer Ted Hearne’s “Sound From the Bench.”

David Hajdu, one of the music jurors this year and a critic for The Nation, said that the group considered more than 100 compositions, including “some pieces of classical music that drew upon hip-hop as a resource,” leading to a philosophical discussion among the jurors about what could be considered.

“That led us to put on the table the fact that this sphere of work” — rap music — “has value on its own terms and not just as a resource for use in a field that is more broadly recognised by the institutional establishment as serious or legitimate,” he said.

When someone mentioned Lamar’s “DAMN”, there was “quite a lot of enthusiasm for it,” Mr Hajdu said, though some members of the jury were less familiar with hip-hop than others. (The jury also included the violinist Regina Carter; Paul Cremo of the Met Opera commissioning programme; Farah Jasmine Griffin, a Columbia professor of English and African-American studies; and the composer David Lang.)

“But we listened to it and there was zero dissent,” Mr Hajdu said. “A lively and constructive conversation, but no dissent.”

He added: “It was a beautiful moment. I left the deliberations on a cloud.”

REACTIONS

The news of the prize sent a jolt through the classical music world, where living composers often struggle to be heard — competing not only against those who work in more popular genres, but also the long-dead greats who make up the classical canon.

Some pooh-poohed Mr Lamar’s win — one classical composer called it “insulting” — but many others embraced it.

Caroline Shaw, a frequent collaborator of Kanye West’s whose “Partita for 8 Voices” won the Pulitzer in 2013, posted a YouTube video of Mr. Lamar on her Twitter feed with one word: “Yes.”

Mr Hearne, whose cantata “Sound From the Bench” was a finalist, praised the decision to award the Pulitzer to Mr. Lamar, calling him “one of the greatest living American composers, for sure.”

It was not until 1997 that the Pulitzer Prize for music went even to a jazz work: Wynton Marsalis’s oratorio “Blood on the Fields”. In 1965, the Pulitzer jurors recommended awarding a special citation to Duke Ellington, but were rejected.

Mr Hajdu, the juror, said that in recent years, those behind the Pulitzers have sought to “assertively think and listen more expansively, with more open ears,” pointing to wins in the music category by the experimental jazz musicians Ornette Coleman in 2007 and Henry Threadgill in 2016. Other popular musicians have been recognised by the Pulitzers with special awards for their influence, including Bob Dylan, who also won a Nobel Prize in Literature; Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical “Hamilton” won in the Pulitzer drama category two years ago.