History was made today as it was announced that Kendrick Lamar, an intellectual rapper from Compton, California who made his rise through the ranks a reality around 2014, won the first ever Pulitzer Prize awarded to a rapper.
As a matter of fact, he’s the first musician to win that wasn’t a jazz or classical act. The award was offered to him for his work on his extremely well-received album DAMN., his fourth studio album.
Kendrick is known for his intellectual and socially aware lyrics, which ultimately earned him the prize. But among the rap community he’s known for his versatility.
If he’s rhyming with complex schemes and multisyllabic rhyme patterns, he may rap faster than usual, cramming in more syllables with a larger vocabulary. But at other times, he’ll keep it incredibly simple with single syllable rhymes and no internal rhyme schemes.
When he does that, though, his flow will become incredibly interesting, showing his purposeful manipulation of every aspect of the a