Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer win

It’s just evolution. Like how The Beatles evolved into Metallica. Evolution of music is fantastic and will continue.

Like my old man (dad) tells me, “everyone talks about the 60’s and 70’s as the golden years of music but there was a lot of garbage around back then too, just like now, nothing’s changed” :grin:

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With that view, Lamar will never appeal to you.

His ability to capture the essence of black life, at its most minute, is also what makes “DAMN.” a great piece of journalism. The album chronicles the black struggle in real time, which makes listening to a Lamar album as satisfying as reading the works of Ida B. Wells or James Baldwin. His music, like the best journalism, is rooted in the moment and grounded in historical significance — like “King Kunta,” an oxymoronic ode to his life as a wealthy black man in America. “DAMN.” is a comprehensive explanation of the black struggle today that deserves its spot in the history books because, like The New York Times’ and The New Yorker’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on sexual assault, Lamar is documenting the reality we live in.

“DAMN.” is really an oral history…

Overall, his combination of reflexive narrative writing and scathing critiques of police violence, poverty and crime in black communities confronts the stories that many media outlets overlook. In doing so, he highlights how the people in these communities manage to survive. Of course, some journalists have dedicated their careers to similar work. But where journalism often prefers to focus on the grittier, more violent aspects of black life, Lamar is free to show the joy, too. His music captures the complexities of what people are feeling at this very moment in America’s political history, and in laying out our fears, he also puts forward our hopes of overcoming them.

Julia Craven in Huffington Post

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That’s right and that’s the reason why I don’t like Hip Hop so much: most songs are very simple in musical/instrumental manner. It’s kind of strange as I like minimal music, for example from Philip Glass, Sonar and even Trip Hop/Downtempo stuff. It seem, my brain can only handle instrumentation or lyrics separately. :wink: I even like movies without background music.

That was well put by Julia Craven - it does capture a political / cultural discourse in an art form - both of which - I am not familiar with but am enjoying the form and lyrics with more listens - incidentally my teenage daughter is going to his concert with her friends - definitely appeals more to the younger folk :smile: