Kendrick Lamar has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for last year’s Damn., an honor that has, in its 75-year history, previously only been awarded to classical and jazz records. The record was initially positioned as the Compton rapper’s back-to-basics effort after the sky-scraping ambition of To Pimp A Butterfly and Good Kid, MaaD City, but it nevertheless contained all the humanity, eloquence, and narrative ambition of its predecessors, a song cycle obsessed with big ideas about life and death and sex and art. (Also: you can listen to the whole thing backwards!) It was described by the prestigious award-giving body as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”
Lamar can add the shiny Pulitzer to a shelf containing five Grammys and a couple A.V. Club album-of-the-year nods, hopefully with a little room leftover for an Oscar for the Black Panther soundtrack.