Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music because he’s truly a music genius

Making Pulitzer Prize history, Kendrick Lamar won the award for the 2018 Prize in Music for his album DAMN.

It’s a good day in music history because Kendrick Lamar has been awarded an actual Pulitzer Prize.

On Monday, Dana Canedy, a Pulitzer administrator, announced the winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Near the end of the broadcast, with a brief pause and a smile on her face, she announced that the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music went to Kendrick Lamar for his 2017 album, DAMN.

In the announcement, Canedy described the album as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexities of modern African-American life.”

And it’s true. The fourth studio album from Lamar is telling of how far he’s come as an artist. In To Pimp a Butterfly (his previous album), Lamar began to touch on subjects of race and the universal black-American experience. By 2017, when he released DAMN., he showed just how far he had come in not only perfecting the sound of his music but the lyrics and themes as well.

The album was nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys and won Best Rap Album in February.

In a category that typically is awarded to jazz or classical artists, Lamar is helping to transform the genre of rap. Though rap has been an artistic reflection on society for years, this acknowledgment just helps to prove how powerful the genre can be.

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Congratulations to Kendrick Lamar on the groundbreaking album and his monumental prize!