Kendrick Lamar just became the first rapper to win a Pulitzer


There's officially no need for Kendrick Lamar to be humble anymore.
On Monday, Lamar became the first rapper to win a Pulitzer for music for his latest album, Damn. The Pulitzer committee hailed Damn as a collection of songs that capture "the complexity of modern African-American life" with " vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism." Lamar's fourth studio album beat out two other collections on the shortlist: a traditional string quartet, and an album that apparently pulled excerpts from ventriloquism textbooks.
Damn also won the Grammy for Best Rap Album this year, but the Compton rapper has oddly never won in any of the major, non-rap categories at the Grammys, as HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen noted. See the full list of Pulitzer prize winners and finalists here.
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Mary Catalfamo is a web intern at The Week. She's a junior at Syracuse University, where she studies journalism and English textual studies. Direct book recommendations and jokes about her hometown of Buffalo, New York to her Twitter.
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