Right. It used to be.
"Didn't the PULITZER PRIZE mainly go to journalists, and authors of quality fiction and non-fiction? John Steinbeck? Eugene O'Neill? That type of person?
Right. But that was when literature was literary and not pudgy E.L. James and pudgier George R.R. Martin. It's dumbed down.
But...THE PULITZER PRIZE. Was it EVER given to...progressive rock? An songwriter like Paul Simon? Maybe...Bob Dylan?
Sheeeit. Dayummmm. Wuttup? What's WRONG with you?
Actually, there has been a PULITZER PRIZE for music going back to the 1940's. The stuffy bunch never considered Cole Porter to be worth a second look. They wouldn't recognize Rodgers and Hart (or Hammerstein) or Frank Loesser or even the Great Sondheim.
To the snoots at the PULITZER BRIZE committee, only CLASSICAL MUSIC and ACADEMIC music belonged.
Classical music, which hadn't produced anything of note since Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Stravinsky's "Firebird," and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," managed to toss a nod to Aaron Copland (1945) for his ballet "Appalachian Spring." Otherwise, it was opera that you may faintly have heard of (two from Gian Carlo Menotti) but would not want to hear, and a lot of experimental classical music nobody wants to hear (George Crumb and Roger Sessions among others).
The list of each decade of PULITZER PRICE awards for Music reads like what it is, a list of arcane, absurd, pretentious high brow snooty snot. There have been very few exceptions to the clique of insular and hardly spectaular or innovative pieces of music they bestowed their recognition on. See for yourself:
You can argue that the PULITZER PRIZE stuffed-shirts have been trying to encourage and breathe life into very dead forms of music. Nobody wants to go to the opera. Nobody wants to go to the ballet. It's the dollar bin that has Wynton Marsalis albums nobody wants. There hasn't even been a token effort to commend Sir Paul McCartney for writing an Oratorio, or Andrew Lloyd Wombat for a rock opera, or Procol Harum for melding rock with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
It can be argued that Broadway gives out Tony Awards, and progressive rockers get Grammy Awards (once in a while...it gets rarer and rarer, doesn't it?) So why single out Kendrick Lamar, when he is making a fortune and getting Grammy Awards and other honors? Who doesn't know this guy? Is it that the people who actually heard 2013 winner Caroline Shaw's "Partita for 8 Voices" or 2013's John Luther Adams' "Become Ocean" need to open their ears and minds and take a listen to Lamar?
Where's the logic in that? What's Lamar doing that Miles Davis didn't do?
What's Lamar doing that "A Whiter Shade of Pale" didn't do?
What push, what change in music did Lamar accomplish that you can't say was equal to Bob Dylan, or even Johnny Rotten or Run DMC?
The PULITZER PRIZE does not recognize the Americana of Johnny Cash or George Jones? KENDRICK LAMAR is the exception?
PC has come to the PULITZER PRIZE, is all. The Nobel Prize honored Dylan, after over 50 years, so these guys took it into a whole different direction, Know Wuttum Sayin'?
We should be listening to all types of music, but THE PULITZER PRIZE didn't think so since it began noticing music in 1943. It was always some uninteresting classical experimentation or maybe a tedious exercise in modern jazz, as long as the people performed it in a tux. Now this. For decades, RAP has been pushed as everything from authentic ghetto music to the revolutionary sound of sex to the mirror of street violence. Along the way, everyone from Kurtis Blow to the great Kanye has been hailed as a genius. Lamar is not unique in being fawned over like a musical Jesus. That he became the PULITZER PRIZE's own Personal Jesus, and now sanctified and given an AMEN so that all schools should study him and everyone should come adore him...is just a bit pathetic.
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