About Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize…of course it’s a great moment for the evolution of music as an art. Or rather for the recognition of how music long ago evolved.
But then there are objections (to put it mildly) inside the classical music world. One of them (the only one I want to talk about right now) is that this is bad for classical composers.
I don’t agree. I think it’s good for us. But I do understand. Classical composers, as a group, have so little. They’re on the margins of the classical world, and outside it they’re barely known at all.
But then, at least until recently, one of them would win the Pulitzer Prize each year. And get things! Performances, commissions, maybe a tenure-track teaching job.
But now if pop stars are going to get Pulitzers, classical composers aren’t guaranteed these opportunities. Which of course won’t make them happy.
But he doesn’t need it!
Some will say that it’s unfair to give Kendrick Lamar a Pulitzer, because he doesn’t need it, because he sells so many records, makes so much money.
But awards aren’t charity! The best film Oscar goes to movies selected from a pool of nominees that we all know are good. That’s why we respect the Oscars. And if one of them goes to something we haven’t heard of, we take that seriously.
And, seriously, now…
The Pulitzer Prize might be the most important arts award given in America. Can we really limit it, in music, to — as the wider world will see it — one tiny corner of the musical universe? A tiny corner that most people barely know exists?
And can we really do that because the artists in that sector say it helps their careers?
This doesn’t seem at all defensible. Unless we revive the old idea that, in the vast universe of music, classical music has supreme and exclusive artistic importance, that it’s the only kind of music that can be art. An idea that used to be taken for granted, but now is dead, that won’t fly in the outside world, or even with most people in classical music (and certainly not with younger ones).
Why it’s good for us
But back to the Oscars and of course other major award shows, which don’t hesitate to give awards to things that are famous, things that are widely loved. Look at the Kendrick Lamar Pulitzer from that point of view, and it’s a great thing for classical composers.
To see why, let’s first stipulate that, to survive, classical music needs to rejoin the wider world.
This doesn’t happen if only classical composers win the Pulitzer. The wider world won’t notice that they win. Why would it? Why pay attention, when people whose names mean nothing to you win a prize for music you’ll never hear?
But now let’s imagine that Pulitzer Prizes regularly go to the full range of music. Which means they often go to artists and to music people know. And respect. And love. (And, of course, to music people argue about, because that’s what happens with awards. “You mean that piece of crap got the Pulitzer prize?”)
And now let’s say that sometimes a classical piece wins. Now people really do notice! “I don’t know that music. But it won the Pulitzer Prize! Gotta hear it.”
Could this be bad for classical music? Just the opposite, I’d think. It would be a classical music triumph. Another step on the path that classical music has to take, the path that brings it back to the world most people live in.
Greg- Why do you not have a standard wordpress re-blog button? If it there, please direct me to it. If you do ot have it you should get it, even if that means changing themes. I use P2 Classic.
I have re-started http://musicsprings.wordpress.com because all of the impotamt sources for me have now finally discovered social media. Please check out the re-born blog.
I still have a ton of our work.
Richard, i don’t control this blog, except for the content. I can speak to the ArtsJournal people about the Reblog button.
Good luck with your relaunch!
Nice to see this balanced assessment. The announcement of this Pulitzer caused me to fire up iTunes and “preview” Kendrick Lamar’s albums. Spectacular use of sound – full spectrum with many really intriguing elements. Not what I would listen to every day, but really polished work. I concluded that bringing the Pulitzer to the attention of more people who otherwise wouldn’t know about it can benefit a wider range of musical artists. Much credit to you for your positive response to this “shock.”
Thanks so much, Sky. I love your quick precis of what you heard in Lamar’s music. Just what i hear!
A long time ago I read a history of the Pulitzer Prize because I was curious as to why there was a music category at all. I associated this award with journalism, literature, and the written word in general. The history of the Pulitzer in music seems pretty checkered, especially with regard to the judges. Now, when a pop-oriented composer is selected for the Grawemeyer Award, that will provoke discussion I’m sure. I just read Eric Whitacre’s posting on whether composers should enter competitions and found his thoughts quite sensible. Of course, it is one thing to enter a competition and another to be nominated for an award. My basic point is that being awarded a Pulitzer isn’t necessarily something to crow about in itself. However, if the “winning” composer and work generate discussion, that is a healthy thing. Uh
The true heirs of Homer are rappers.
Twenty years ago, my thesis on that topic was not well received by the classics department, but linguistics loved it and one music professor got it. A Bach scholar, he had traced JSB’s international influences (Vivaldi, etc.) and understood that Hip Hop, by accepting all genres with open arms, had the potential to accelerate evolution through hybrid vigor. But the classics department felt threatened… Just like the classical cult today regarding “their” Pulitzer.
And can I really blame my old gurus? Twenty years ago, few imagined today’s world full of hip hop professors. And my close reading of Wu Tang, Red Man, and others, full of F-Bombs, N-Words, and all the rest, was scary I guess…
But we must engage art on its own terms if we are to judge its merit!
To that end, I tried to show how the flexibility of African-American English Vernacular enabled rappers to prioritize sound and rhythm just like the Greek and Roman poets back in the day. You see, Greek and Latin are inflected languages. Word endings, not word order, indicate grammatical function. If you properly adjust the final sound, you can toss any word around wherever you want… Language becomes more musical… Rhythmic… Beautiful… So in my view, “ebonics” was not a sign of poor education but rather the most exciting thing happening to a living language, the unshackling of English, allowing it to flow more like the ancient Greek and Latin I’d been studying.
So I hope you get the idea that I know a thing or two about hip hop…
But I’m a classically trained composer too. And I am THRILLED that Kendrick won “our” Pulitzer!
Why? Because he is at the top of his game, standing upon the shoulders of giants while moving his art forward. He’s doing what classical composers used to do (imitate your influences until you master your craft, then recombine that musical DNA into something fresh that resonates in your own time). In short, he deserves it. We don’t.
I have to admit I didn’t LOVE Kendrick at first… He seemed to reflect the voices of his influences a bit too closely… Adopting and dropping the various personae of rappers I’d featured in my thesis even, right down to the smallest vocal inflections… I remember thinking… Wait, he’s just stealing from Red Man there! And now he’s copying Method Man! And now he sounds like ODB! WTF? I was pissed off! But I still listened to that album twenty more times…
Eventually, I gave Kendrick permission to mess with “my” influences and realized this was the long-awaited evolution of hip hop I was witnessing. We’d finally made it to the point where gimmicky individualistic “flow” could take a back seat to a stylistically flexible narrator, one who can adopt any voice at any time (and is thus able to tell any story). Hip hop has matured enough that the next generation can recombine its DNA in fresh new ways… And that’s a GOOD thing!
Wouldn’t it be great if classical composers felt the same freedom? We can’t use tonality because everything has been said… And no whole tones because Debussy did it better… And then Messiaen had to fill in every last gap with his modes of limited transposition! So what’s left for the next generation to explore? Not even silence. That’s been done too!
But if a struggling young composer wants advice, I for one would tell them to emulate Kendrick Lamar!
Why? Because his formula is the same formula that every impactful artist in any genre has always used. First, LOVE the art you’ve inherited. Eat, sleep, and breathe it. Then imitate until you’ve mastered it. Then recombine that DNA into something fresh that has enough spectacle to resonate with YOUR generation. Kendrick’s voice is not “unique”… It is BETTER than “unique”… It is a conscious fusion of many voices that extends their reach through time.
Bach didn’t write “unique” or “original” fugues either… Many he inherited from Fischer, refining them in the process. Mozart didn’t bother to tweak at all, rewriting Bach’s fugues note for note and passing them off as his own! The point is that just about ALL of our canonical masters followed a similar formula… Love your influences, master their voices, and when your craft has cleared the bars they set, repackage the inherited DNA for YOUR time.
Who in the classical world is REALLY doing that today?
Kendrick deservers “our” Pulitzer more than we do!
Brilliant, CT. Classical composers often seem to write looking over their shoulders, making sure everyone will think their music is classical enough. Though, to be fair, many don’t, especially younger ones. Still, there’s a sense I get of classical tradition hanging over many works, which sound like they’re designed for the classical concert hall, and bring with them all its airlessness.
Though so important —- the composers, some famous, who are truly independent voices. Like Pulitzer Prize winners Caroline Shaw and David Lang and Julia Wolfe. David, yay for him, was on the jury that unanimously recommended the award for Lamar.
Maybe it’s a good thing for the Pulitzer for music to go to a smash-hit album, but no composer who wasn’t black could possibly have published songs with the lyrics that Lamar Kendrick sets.
See:
https://genius.com/a/read-all-the-lyrics-to-kendrick-lamar-s-new-album-damn
Would you say a little more about this, so we can clearly understand what you mean?
Obviously no one not black could have made this album. To me that’s another great thing about it winning the Pulitzer Prize. The prize in music person goes into cultural territory it never entered before. Contemporary black culture.
And it’s surely not remarkable for great art to come out of a particular culture. Nobody not black could have written James Baldwin’s books, or Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Only a German could have written Die Meistersinger, only someone French could have written Debussy’s music (or Boulez’s), only someone Irish could have written Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.
And it’s a small thing, what I’m going to say, but worth noting. To say Lamar “set” these lyrics is very much a classical music view. Not the way things normally work these days outside classical music. He wrote them, then built the music around them, maybe had ideas for the music while he was thinking up the lyrics, maybe wrote or changed some of the lyrics in the studio while the music was being created. It’s all one process, unlike classical music, where the words normally come first, and then the composer sets them to music.
What I don’t clearly understand about your comment is whether you think it’s blackness is a good thing or a limitation. Anyone who thinks it’s a limitation might ask themselves why the work of James Joyce et al (see above) wouldn’t be thought limited because of the ethnicity it came from.
We could also remember that the ultimate source of black music is Africa. And that therefore Lamar’s album (how about the vocal harmony with familiar chords right at the start?) couldn’t exist if the African slaves hadn’t mixed European music into what they brought with them from Africa, once they heard it in America.
You are right that I should have been more specific. I have no disagreement with what you’ve said above–it’s very thoughtful.
I was shocked when I read the words for the songs, which to me seem very out of step with current attitudes to sexism and racism. But I see that serious critics have suggested that Lamar could just as well have won the literature award, so I’m out of step there. But I suspect that if a composer who wasn’t black had written those words, the award of the music Pulitzer might have evoked a less favorable reaction.
Those words aren’t out of the ordinary for hiphop. But I can well understand they’d surprise people who haven’t heard hiphop over the years, and gotten used to the language used. Not that every hiphop songs uses that language!
There definitely are different rules for black and white people here. Take the N word, which white peole know they’d better not use. You here it often in hiphop, or in black street talk. It can even be an affectionate thing that one black guy on the street calls another one. I don’t think there’s unanimous approval in the black community for this, but it’s prevalent anyway.
You could say it’s people taking a term of abuse that’s been hurled at them, and empowering it for their own use. As some women have done with words like slut. Or think of Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. Someone on Twitter hurled abuse at her, saying something like “dumb whores go to hell.” She came right back with, “Whew! Glad I’m a smart one!” It would be pretty ghastly for me to throw that W word at her, but when she comes back so wittily and embraces it, more power to her.
The larger moral here, maybe: That the world looks very different from different vantage points. In a documentary on James Baldwin I was a 1960s TV clip, in which a clueless (as we can see now) white intellectual insists that he and Baldwin are brought together because they’re intellectuals more than they’re separated by their race. Totally clueless man, unable to see what the world looks like — what kind of experience of life you have — if you’re black. Some of that factors into lyrics that African-Americans can use in a song, but nobody white ever could.
Eminem, a rapper DEEPLY respected in the black community, has spouted plenty of apparently misogynistic lyrics (and he happens to be white, but why does that matter?).
LOOOONG before him, the last white rapper I cared about was even worse… Some poems of Catullus are so disturbing that I hesitate to quote them… Even in Latin I wouldn’t give you those lines here because you might cut and paste them into Google translate and judge him out of context.
In his time, Catullus was EXPECTED to show off his skills in several established styles… Love poems, meditations on death, invective take downs, and yes, even “mine is bigger than yours” brag raps. Catullus nailed every category, and his adoring fans ate it up (because he was GREAT at it!).
And shouldn’t art imitate life? Life is messy and full of unsavory things…
Racist, misogynist, confused, angry, and otherwise disturbed people exist… Our operas are full of them.
Do we judge our sopranos and tenors by the characters they portray on stage?
Of course not! That would be absurd… We know it is just an opera put on for our entertainment.
When are we going to allow rappers (black or white) the same artistic license?
And when are white people going to figure out that THEY aren’t always the intended audience… That maybe they should learn something about the art and the culture it comes from before judging it?