Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is the most decorated rapper of his generation and the only artist outside classical and jazz to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He works at album length rather than at single length, which is the shortest way to say what separates him from most of his contemporaries: the records are built as arguments, with recurring characters, a thesis and a turn.
He was born in 1987 in Compton, and the city is not set dressing in the work — it is the subject of the first two records and the vantage point of everything after them.
The records that matter
- good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) is a single day in Compton told out of order, narrated by a teenager who is not in control of it. It is the record that made the case that a rap album could sustain a plot.
- To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) traded the cinematic sound for live funk and free jazz, and is the one most often called his best and his most difficult. Alright left the record entirely and became a protest chant.
- DAMN. (2017) is the most direct and the most commercially successful, and the one the Pulitzer board cited.
Why the Pulitzer mattered
The 2018 award was the first time the music prize went outside the classical and jazz traditions in its seventy-five-year history. The significance is less about him than about the category: an institution that had spent decades treating popular music as a separate and lesser thing conceded the point in a single decision, and the citation praised the writing rather than the sales.
He is ranked in Best hip hop artists, usually somewhere near Eminem, and the two are a useful pair precisely because they are good at different things — one is rated on the line, the other on the record.
The argument he settled is not whether rap is literature. It is whether the people who hand out the prizes had been paying attention.