Posted on 04/22/2018 10:25:19 AM PDT by Simon Green
If we valued black art, Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer would have been for literature. When will the education system wake up to black creativity?
I can’t help thinking that the Pulitzer prize committee missed a trick in their award to the rapper Kendrick Lamar this week. If they had given him the Pulitzer for literature rather than for music it would have elevated his artform and sent a message that would have resonated around the world: that rap is a legitimate form of poetry and should be put on a par with, and treated with the same deference as, Shakespeare and Wordsworth.
Let’s be honest, Kendrick Lamar, Stormzy, BBK and Giggs have a greater impact and more relevance today than all the literary “greats” wandering lonely as a cloud on some dusty bookshelf in some crusty corner, waiting to be forced down the school curriculum gullets of young people.
If the Pulitzer people had only bitten the bullet and done the equivalent of what the Nobel committee did for Bob Dylan and rock lyrics when they said, “You know what? We’re going to get dissed and ridiculed for even putting Dylan on the same level as John Steinbeck, but what the heck. Let’s just do it and take the flak.” Who knows what the dividend would have been for wider society?
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
>>As for rap music, we used to compose chants of similar quality and character. When we were ten years old.
Rappers were inspired by the sing-songy playground rhymes of their older sisters playing jump rope.
But there ain’t no street cred in saying that your baby sittin’ big sis was the basis for your rhymes so they claim it was from the pimp toasts they never got to hear as kiddos.
Times like these, Star Trek crews need four hands for sufficient face palms.
The author of this piece has the mind of a two-year-old and is utterly and absolutely clueless.
Ditto - I’ll even volunteer to say a few words at the grave....
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