[Found this sitting in my drafts folder—have to try to remember where I was going with it! Until then, enjoy!]
In 2016, the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group convened a panel discussion on Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Five scholars—four of whom are white and three of whom are men (no real surprise, given the make-up of the Society)—presented their research on different aspects of the music. Manabe and Ohriner have been doing hip hop scholarship for several years; it’s not entirely clear what connection the other theorists had with the genre prior to presenting these papers. Attas suggests that Lamar’s music (and rap music generally) could be included in the typical music theory classroom as a way in to addressing issues of social justice.
While the authors do offer some novel ways of exploring Lamar’s music, they do so in ways that generally uphold colonial research paradigms and the discipline’s white racial frame.
The papers, with an introduction by Philip Ewell, appeared in a 2019 issue of Music Theory Online, published not long after Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his album DAMN.
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The Pulitzer Prize in Music has been awarded since 1943 for a “distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year.” The committee has generally conferred the award on contemporary classical composers: Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Ned Rorem, and Steve Reich are all winners. In 1996, the board announced changes to the criteria that were intended to attract a wider range of American music. The following year, Wynton Marsalis won for his oratorio Blood in the Fields.
Marsalis’s win was surrounded by controversy: the composition, Blood in the Fields, was premiered in 1994, but it won the prize in 1997—the first jazz composition to do so. Marsalis made revisions to the score in 1997 and claimed that the revisions resulted in a new work that was eligible for consideration. Marsalis, too, is widely considered to be a conservative jazz artist, making him a safe choice. It is also important to note that the committee intended to honor Duke Ellington with a special citation in 1965, but the Pulitzer Board rejected the nomination.
Another revision of the guidelines in 2004 made way for wins by jazz artists Ornette Coleman (2007) and Henry Threadgill (2016). Historically, few women have won the prize; and few composers of color. No popular musicians have won the award—nor have they been nominated—until Kendrick Lamar’s fourth studio album, DAMN., won the prize in 2018. The committee praised the album as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”[1] The other nominees—a string quartet by Michael Gilbertson and Sound From the Bench, a cantata by Ted Hearne—are the kinds of western art music works that have traditionally won the award.
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In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, and in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment promised equal rights (including citizenship and legal protection) to newly freed slaves. Although they were granted rights in theory, in practice, black Americans still faced prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that race-based segregation was not illegal if the facilities available to both were of equal quality. Jim Crow laws maintained segregation in the United States through the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1954, the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education made race-based school segregation illegal. Brown was certainly not the first attempt to desegregate schools, but it was the first one that succeeded. In seeking to understand why this passed, legal scholar Derrick Bell indicates that the decision was not grounded in race-neutral thinking. While the Brown ruling is generally presented in terms of the good it did for the black community, Bell argues that in order to understand the decision fully, we must also consider what white America stood to gain from desegregating schools. Bell’s reasoning came to be known as the interest convergence hypothesis.
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A question I’ve found myself asking a lot lately is “who benefits from this, and how?” To me, this question emerges from considering Bell’s theory of interest convergence. Why did the Society for Music Theory organize a roundtable on To Pimp a Butterfly? Rap’s been around for more than 40 years, and there have been many landmark albums that could’ve provided material for a panel discussion, but this is the first (to my recollection—please correct me if I’m wrong) time it has happened. Who benefits from this, and how?
Why did it take the Pulitzer committee more than 50 years to honor the first vernacular album? Why wasn’t To Pimp a Butterfly even nominated (to me, and I’d imagine to many others, it’s the more important, more groundbreaking, more Pulitzer-y album)? Who benefits from this and how?
[1] https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/225