Rapper Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in music this week, and lots of people who don’t know much about rap went crazy talking about what a seismic event it was.
Slow your roll, everyone. The award was a giant leap for the Pulitzers, but only a small step for rap.
It’s not like rap hasn’t won big awards before. Lin-Manuel Miranda won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for his hip-hop musical “Hamilton” in 2016. Rapper-singer Lauryn Hill won a Grammy for album of the year almost two decades ago. The rapper Common has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Golden Globe and three Grammys. Even Three 6 Mafia, a rap group nobody remembers, managed to win an Oscar in 2006 for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” a rap song nobody liked.
Rap has been around for more than four decades, and people are still acting like it’s just one MacArthur “genius grant” away from getting mainstream respect. Major awards actually need rap more than the genre needs major awards. It’s more likely that Mr. Lamar’s win will draw attention to the other Pulitzer winners than that, say, the Des Moines Register’s award in editorial writing will spur people to pick up Lamar’s new album “DAMN.”
‘Awards are like the light from distant stars—the twinkle we see in the sky takes years to reach our eyes.’
The music is long past the point of having arrived. Rap moguls like Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, and Sean “Diddy” Combs have personal portfolios that are reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Veteran rappers like Will Smith and Queen Latifah are so famous and successful in television, movies and other fields that younger fans don’t even know that they ever had rap careers. When Toronto Raptors basketball games are on TV, the cameras focus more on the Canadian rapper Drake sitting in the front row than on the team’s players sitting on the bench.
Rap’s history is so firmly established that its current stars are able to draw on its rich past for inspiration. Recently, two rappers released two new songs, Drake’s “Nice for What” and Cardi B’s “Be Careful,” that both sampled the same classic hip-hop soul track, Lauryn Hill’s 1998 hit “Ex-Factor,” from her Grammy-winning album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” This week, Ms. Hill announced a tour to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary.
That’s right, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” is two decades old. Rap has been around a loooong time. Don’t buy all the think pieces about how it’s just now getting some notice.
When I was a kid, I’d play The Sugar Hill Gang or Run-D.M.C. on my boombox, and some of my high-school classmates would make fun of it and say rap was “just talking.” And they were right in a way. The careful crafting and curating of words is why “Hamilton” did a better job of evoking the American founders than its Broadway predecessor “1776.” As Mr. Miranda and others have pointed out, hip-hop uses more words—and more sophisticated ones—than rock and other musical genres. But kids aren’t arguing about these issues any more. It’s all been settled for a while now.
Mr. Lamar’s album is getting widespread recognition not because rap is coming into its own as an art form but because he’s come into his own as an artist. “DAMN.” is a daring album that’s timely and timeless, with incisive lyrics about race, sex, police brutality and wealth inequality. Mr. Lamar needed a Pulitzer to validate his craft like he needed the $15,000 prize money to bulk up his bank account. I have a feeling he’s good either way.
Awards are like the light from distant stars—the twinkle we see in the sky takes years to reach our eyes. Bob Dylan’s heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s, but the Grammys only got around to giving him Album of the Year in 1998. He didn’t get Pulitzer recognition until 2008, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. In other words, Kanye West may be waiting some time for his call from the Swedish Academy. Twenty-year-old XXXTentacion may have to wait even longer.
It’s great that the Pulitzers have discovered rap, but it’s a place that has people living there already. It’s called planet Earth.