The Pulitzer Went to Compton

The Pulitzer Prize for Music had been handed out since 1943. For seventy five years it went to classical composers, and eventually to jazz. Then in 2018 the committee gave it to DAMN., a rap album by Kendrick Lamar Duckworth of Compton, California. First artist outside classical and jazz to ever hold it.

I need you to sit with what that means. The most establishment prize in American music looked at a kid from Rosecrans and Central and said: this is the composer of his era.

Here is the part that makes it ours. Kendrick did not win by smoothing anything out. good kid, m.A.A.d city is subtitled a short film by Kendrick Lamar, and it plays like one, set entirely in the Compton he actually grew up in. Real streets, real vans, real fear, real grace. To Pimp a Butterfly pulled from jazz and funk and Black political thought without asking permission or offering a glossary.

He talked to us in our language, at full complexity, and let the rest of the world catch up. And the world did. That is the lesson young creatives should tattoo somewhere: the specific is universal. The block you are from is not a limit on your art. It is the material.

“They did not lower the bar for Compton. Compton raised the bar for them.”