Untitled

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.” The Pulitzer board, like most award-granting institutions, still needs to be mindful of the cultural and political forces that inevitably inform its choices—of the seventy-one Pulitzer Prizes presented in Music, somehow only seven (!) have gone to women. (The first woman to garner one, Ellen Zwilich, received it in 1983—a staggering forty years after William Schuman collected the début Pulitzer in music.) Genius, of course, still has its invisible boundaries. But Lamar’s win nonetheless feels like a victory of sorts for everyone, a promise that true excellence is—as it should be—very difficult to ignore.