The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes

Kendrick Lamar (pitchfork.com)

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize Foundation announced its 2018 honorees, and this year list brought a particularly unexpected surprise: in the traditionally most aesthetically narrow arts category, Music, the prize committee threw prize watches for a complete loop and selected Kendrick Lamar, the platinum record-selling, Grammy-nominated hip hop artist, for his 2017 album DAMN. The Pulitzer jury noted that Lamar's work was a:

Recording released on April 14, 2017, a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.

With his win, Lamar became the first musician not working in a classical/Euro-American or jazz idiom to receive the award, and only the fifth African American since the Music prize was initially awarded in 1943. In fact, there was no Black winner at all until classical composer George Walker won in 1996 for Lilacs, for voice and orchestra. Since then, the other recipients have been Wynton Marsalis in 1997 for Blood on the Fields, the first strictly jazz composition to win; Ornette Coleman's jazz LP Sound Grammar, which won in 2007; and Henry Threadgill's In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.

Indeed, the Music category award roll was, until Walker's award, notorious for excluding not just Black musicians, but all music not falling under the general rubric of "classical music," and in particular, academic classical compositions. Some of the greatest American musicians, including Duke Ellington (posthumously, in 1999), George Gershwin (posthumously, in 1998), John Coltrane (posthumously, in 2007), Thelonious Monk (posthumously in 2006), and Scott Joplin (posthumously, in 1976!), received "Special Citations," but were otherwise ignored, as were all forms of popular music, however symphonic or orchestral, in the Music category.

Interestingly enough, musical theater, beginning with Of Thee I Sing, by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin, was honored in the Drama category as far back as 1932, and over the years, other musicals, like Richard Rodgers' and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific in 1950, were recognized, as "Drama," but not as "Music." This was about as close as the Pulitzer Music juries got to the popular music of the moment.




The honoring of hip hop marked an immense shift and might be a harbinger of things to come, as judges in this category, joining their peers in others, may now decide to take a broader view of the contemporary artistic landscape. Lamar is the real thing; about as far as you can get from hip hop-lite and user-friendly lyrics, he's insistently innovative and political, and very much grounded in the language and culture of his native South Central Los Angeles. (None of this year's music judges were hip hop musicians, but adding some now may also help to shake things up in the future.) But we will, I guess, see what happens going forward. The two finalists in the Music category fell into the more traditional classical/art music vein: Michael Gilbertson, for his string composition Quartet, and Ted Hearne, for his cantata for chamber orchestra, electric guitar, and percussion Sound from the Bench. In past years, either might have won.

I can imagine, however, that some classical musicians, who may already feel beleaguered by the shifts in the music industry as a whole and the reported declines in attendance at classical concerts, may now feel concern that what was their protected sphere, as far as widely known US national awards go, no longer exists. That may be true, but then perhaps the award should not have been called "Music," but more strictly named to reflect how much music and how many musicians had been excluded from consideration. Some prior classical music winners--Aaron Copland (1945), Charles Ives (1947), Virgil Thomson (1949), Gian-Carlo Menotti (1950), Samuel Barber (1958), Steve Reich (2009), and of course Marsalis and Coleman, have been in the ears of the wider public, or some of their music has (I recently heard one of Reich's most famous pieces, "Come Out," sampled in a hip hop song, and Barber's Adagio for Strings has been performed more than once on TV, etc.), but in general, far too many of the Music winners remained mostly unheard and unknown to a degree unlike anyother category, including Poetry or Drama.

Other winners in the "Letters, Drama & Music" section included poet Frank Bidart, for Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar Straus & Giroux), a nod towards his status as one of the senior, major figures in American poetry, and someone who had never received a Pulitzer before. I was very happy to see that the two finalists were two poets I know and admire, and collections I thought were stellar: Patricia Smith, for her collection Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press), and Evie Shockley, for her collection semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press). Given the threats university presses are facing these days, this was also a good vote of confidence in publishing in a genre that has remained the least commercial.

The poetry citation

The Fiction winner was novelist Andrew Sean Greer, for his comic novel Fiction Less (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company), and the finalists were In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press), and The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press).  In the Drama category, Maryna Majok's Cost of Living received the award; the two finalists were Everybody, by the very brilliant and talented young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and The Minutes, by actor and playwright Tracy Letts. Bidart's and Greer's awards may have marked one of the rare times that the poetry and fiction winners were both out, gay male writers; had Jacobs-Jenkins also been honored, it would have marked a very rare trifecta.

In the History category, Jack E. Davis's The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (Liveright/W.W. Norton), an exploration of the history of the Gulf of Mexico, received the committee's nod. The two finalists were Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein (Metropolitan Books), and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross (Bloomsbury). The Biography recipient was Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books); the two finalists in that category were Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday), and Kay Redfield Jamison's Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (Alfred A. Knopf).

Lastly, under the arts and letters aegis, in the category of General Nonfiction, the winner was the highly praised study Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The two finalists were Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World, by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum (Doubleday)

I must admit that I have tended to pay less attention to the News winners, but some did catch my eye this year. First, art critic and provocateur--and former reality show judge!--Jerry Saltz received the Pulitzer in Criticism for his commentary in New York Magazine. I sometimes strongly disagree with Saltz's readings of exhibits and the general culture, but I do think he knows how to get readers to think about art and society.

In the Public Service category, the recipients were The New York Times, for coverage led by Jodi Kantor, and The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow, for their exploration of the sexual predation, harassment and abuse in Hollywood and other realms of US life, in response to the #MeToo moment and movement. The Washington Post won in the category of Investigative Reporting for its coverage of the Alabama Senate race, and its revelations of the Republican candidate Roy Moore's sexual abuse of an underage teenager; in part because of this necessary reporting, he may have been defeated by Democrat Doug Jones.

I must admit to some skepticism about the dual award in the National Reporting category, however; while the Washington Post rightly deserved a Pulitzer for its thoroughgoing attempts to enlighten the American public about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Pulitzer board moved the New York Times into contention for this award as well, and then jointly named that paper as a winner. Yet the Times has never explained its bizarre October 31, 2016 report that the FBI had determined there was no Russian interference in the election, which we now know was completely wrong based on multiple accounts, and not long after former public editor Liz Spayd attempted to answer the strange report--who gave the Times this information?--she was let go. Will we ever know what or who was behind that Times report, which provided official establishment and news ballast and support for the Trump campaign? Should the Times have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this work given this massive blunder?

Reviews: Lee's Go Set a Watchman & Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical

Harper Lee and her novel cover for Go Set
a Watchman (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/
Getty Images. Courtesy of VICE & HarperCollins)

As I wrote yesterday, during my quiet stretch here I have been writing for other publications, and just before my last July blog entry, the double obit for E. L. Doctorow and Ornette Coleman, I posted a review of Harper Lee's new (old) novel at VICE, "Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman Reveals the Limits of the Liberal Imagination." Two paragraphs:

As a counterpoint and complement to the compelling fantasy of Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman possesses real value. What was often latent in the later novel is on full display here, ranging from the middle-class whites' classism, self-absorption, and entitlement to a racial-epithet-packed screed that would not appear out of place on a forum like Stormfront. Reading Go Set a Watchman also made me wonder how it might have been received by critics and the public if it had appeared in the late 50s, and whether there exists another work of fiction from these years by a young white Southern writer that so baldly lays bare the complicity of the mass of white Southerners, particularly the social elites and middle class, in maintaining white supremacy.

In its focus on liberalism's limitations, and its conclusion in Jean Louise's sentimental emotional accommodation with her father's and family's views—"I can't beat him, and I can't join him"—the book also feels very contemporary, since we still encounter unironic invocations of America as a "post-racial" society in the public discourse, despite constant  indications to the contrary.

There's more at the link above. Oh--and I definitely recommend reading Lee's new (old) book.

***

Ensemble and Lin-Manuel Miranda (at right)
in Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)

Recently I had the excellent fortune to see Lin-Manuel Miranda's masterpiece, Hamilton: An American Musical, which has made a smooth transition from the Public Theater, where it debuted to acclaim, to Broadway, at the Richard Rogers Theater. I could rhapsodize about Miranda's artistry at length, but VICE fortunately has word limits and editors, so you can read my distilled thoughts about this work at "The Best Musical of the Year Is a Hip-Hop Show About Alexander Hamilton."

Not only do I talk about all the kinds of hip hop (from freestyle to chopper) Miranda manages to incorporate, but I also devote a few paragraphs to the multiple political implications of this work. It's not a long review so please do check it out.

One quote:

Hamilton also offers one of the best and most compelling counternarratives to the increasingly extreme conservative rhetoric around immigration. Alexander Hamilton, Miranda never lets the audience forget, was an immigrant from a small island, with a sketchy education, no money, and few prospects, and became the target of constant social and political antagonism. Even factoring in the neoliberal undercurrent of the hardworking, self-made man the musical espouses, Hamilton artfully hammers away at the idea that power should be concentrated in the hands of an elite, or that opportunity should not be extended as widely as possible, repeatedly connecting this thread to larger ideas about race and class. Many of the musical's catchphrases, including "We are a movement," "Rise up," and "The world turned upside down," would sound as fitting at a protest as they do on Broadway.

Above all, GO SEE HAMILTON! It just may rock your bells, and your world.

Spring Semester Classes Begin

This post is of zero interest to anyone beyond my students and me, I know, but Spring 2013 semester classes began today, first thing this morning to be exact, and I'm excited about both of them, but especially about my undergraduate literature class, which incorporates some material I've taught before but many new texts as well. That class is officially an English and African American Studies class on The Black Arts Movement, satisfying two distinct registrations (and I thus have two Blackboard sites, which is a little disorienting), and covers not only aspects of the movement itself, but several antecedent moments (The Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black American poetry of the 1950s) and successors (a Spike Lee film, Public Enemy's music, and Kia Corthron's play Force Continuum). At the core of the course we'll be delving into a great deal of Amiri BarakI've included a good deal of  scholarly, critical and theoretical material (by figures from Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois to more recent scholars and authors like Cheryl Clarke, Howard Rambsy II, Cherise Pollard, and Lorrie Smith, as well as primary), including some primary documents by Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka and others. It's a decent-sized class (anywhere from 18-26 students, depending upon how many stay enrolled, and smaller is always better for the students and their professor) and thus manageable. The second course is one all members of the African American and African Studies teach in rotation, Introduction to African American Studies (Part II), which spans the period from Reconstruction through today, and which draws a pretty sizable enrollment. Right now I have about 45-50 students, but one asked about the amount of reading (up to 200 pages a week, from an array of texts, including historical and critical studies in a range of fields, primary documents by the likes of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and creative works), so perhaps the numbers will slim down by next week. As with my fall classes my students come from a range of backgrounds, though the majority are black (African American, African, Caribbean, mixed race, etc.), latino (many Afro-Latino), and Asian-American (South Asian and East Asian), which I learned quickly lent a very different cast to the conversations we had about the course material. I expect no less this semester. We begin with Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, a book I haven't read in many years, and rereading it in preparation for the class has reminded me why I enjoyed it so years ago, and how rich and complex our history--black history, American history--truly is.

Frank Ocean, Anderson Cooper & Coming Out

Frank Ocean

A few days ago, the noted TV news personality and multimillionaire heir (to the Vanderbilt fortune) Anderson Cooper came out, after years of public speculation by his fans and years of being open among a private network of friends, associates and coworkers. To be truthful, Cooper, a very rich and well-placed white man, had very little to lose but his gossamer secret by declaring, in the offhanded way he did via a letter to his friend, conservative writer and pundit Andrew Sullivan, that he was "gay." He did not, as his peer Don Lemon did, come on the air and tell the world. He didn't even pick a gay pride celebration to make his statement. Yet he did it, and in so doing he was not going to lose his post as a CNN media figure; he was not going to lose his fans, most of whom not only couldn't have cared less that he was gay but had long wanted him to publicly come out; he was not going to lose his millions by being cut off by his mother, designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt; in fact, he wasn't going to lose much of anything except his key to a gilded yet fairly transparent closet. I say all of this not to attack Cooper, because I praise his public self-affirmation as a gay person, as queer man. I think it's wonderful, especially in light of the ongoing shift in public attitudes in the US and across the globe concerning gay rights and equality, and in light of the ongoing struggles, de facto and de jure, that queer people all over the US and the globe still face in terms of homophobic and heterosexist oppression. I applaud Anderson Cooper with the strongest and gayest claps possible. But he didn't have much to lose, and he didn't have a long walk to take out of a closet that barely existed, though he'd kept its door cracked and its walls intact.

In contrast, on Tuesday the 24-year-old singer and songwriter Frank Ocean, a member of the loose collective Odd Future, which has been rightly criticized for the violently anti-gay and misogynistic raps of some of its members, particularly Tyler the Creator (cf. "Yonkers"), bravely posted on his Tumblr page a two-paragraph letter--who says this ancient form no longer has relevance or power!?--letting the world know that his first love was a man he'd met when they were both 19 years old, and that that experience, however complicated and painful in some ways, however unreciprocal and difficult, had been transformative for him. Ocean did not use the word "gay" or any similar term, preferring instead simply to state for the record that the relationship had existed, what it meant and continues to mean for him, thanking hte unnamed beloved and letting him know that because of it he felt and "feel[s] like a free man." In other words, he acknowledged his queerness by acknowledging the truth of his life, and no labels were nor are necessary, though this did not prevent media outlets, Twitterers and Facebookers, and a good many of everybody else stating that he was "gay" or "bisexual" or trying to pin a label on him.

Ocean's letter, from his Tumblr page

Since then neither Ocean nor his publicists nor his bandmates have posted a retraction. The responses from Odd Future's Tyler the Creator and others across the music industry, especially in the genres that Ocean has worked most extensively, hiphop and R&B, have been almost uniformly positive and affirming. (Tyler tweeted on Wednesday, "My big brother finally f---ing did that. Proud of that n---a cause I know that sh-- is difficult or whatever. Anyway. I'm a toilet." Uh, okay.) Ocean's new and first full album, Channel Orange, is set to drop, and with media speculation percolating about the pronouns he'd chosen in three songs, so he very well could have come up with an excuse or denials and kept hidden the sort of relationship, however one-sided the letter suggests it was emotionally, that Terrance Dean chronicled in his 2008 book Hiding In Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry from Music to Hollywood (Simon & Schuster), and played the game as it usually is. Instead, by sharing this aspect of still brief life, he risked quite a bit, and still faces huge risks, but nevertheless took a step that unfortunately far too many figures much further along in their careers--Queen Latifah, for example--are still unwilling to take.

Tyler the Creator and Frank Ocean (© Getty Images)

One may argue that given these risks and dangers are far greater for non-celebrities--Ocean after all appears on one of the best-known tracks on Jay Z's and Kanye West's recent album and is a member of a thriving musical group--and, in the absence of federal civil protections for queer people and the institution of overtly anti-gay laws in some states, as well as persistent homophobic and heterosexist attitudes, rhetoric and behavior by many major religious groups, anyone who is considering coming out has reason to be wary. This is true; one can ask too to what and to whom anyone is "coming out"; in the absence of affirmation and support, being openly queer--gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, unlabeled but self-posited as a non-heterosexual, as questioning, as emergent, as sexually and gender-fluid--can still be a life or death proposition, for someone of any age. For women, for people of color, for working-class and poor people, for a person with physical or mental challenges, for a religious minority or someone occupying all of these categories, the challenges and risks multiply. Thus the simplistic call for people to come out, born out of the earliest days of the post-Stonewall Rebellion movement towards gay rights and equality--Come Out! was in fact the name of one of the very first gay publications--must always be considered within the context of the specific people for whom it is cast, the society in which it might occur, the risks it entails. One can come out and go back in, or be out and still be continually be coming out. It isn't a one-time proposition, and it won't be for Cooper, if you can believe that, and certainly not for Frank Ocean.

Anderson Cooper

Whatever Frank Ocean decides to do, whatever he decides to call himself tomorrow or down the road, whatever he songs he writes and to whomever he address them, whatever the gender, he has had a major impact on the public discourse through his courageous step, and, I want to note this, those around him in the R&B and hiphop communities have also made a major impact by responding as they did. It is particularly invaluable for young black people, not just in the US but all over the globe, especially in places where internal and outside forces have ramped up homophobia, to see that a young black person, at the center of the forms of cultural production that animates local and global imaginaries, can speak about his life with truth and bravery and not be ashamed or duplicitous, that he can speak about falling in love with another person of the same sex, and talk about his hurt but also how much he gained from that experienced, and how it has brought him a freedom many people dream of, an emotional freedom, and a truthfulness, that so many queer people still struggle to attain.

I praise his courage and his candor, and urge others who can and are able to follow his lead to do so, just as I praise those like Cooper who have already got the world by their fingertips and decide to step out, be out, open up. I also urge all who can work to change the laws, here and abroad, that foment homophobia--which, as Barbara Smith, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, and countless other visionaries have in their various ways noted lies at the core of nearly all anti-gay activity--and that foster oppression and inequality to do so, because by doing both, as he suggests, we all might be on the road to being "free."

Kanye West's Art Film

It's his video for "Runaway," but actually contains a condensed medley of many of his songs on his recent album, My Dark Twisted Fantasy, and I think it's one of the best music videos I've seen in decades; so good, in fact, that it approaches the status of art. If you aren't among the 8 million or so people who've seen it yet imagine a cross between Liquid Sky and The Man Who Fell To Earth but with a female phoenix, ballerinas, and an African last supper. Stretching for over half an hour. It really does work, believe me....

A still from the video for "Runaway"

September Comings & Goings (Artists, Fat Beats, Almanacs)

While on my way from one place to another, I happened upon a corner display of colorful, witty series of vernacular paintings and decoupages in SoHo that stopped me in my tracks. After a little bit of conversation, I learned that the pieces were the work of Patrick-Earl.com, who works in a range of media and whose deceptively simple imagery contains more than its sly share of political and social commentary. (That it was on display outside an empty storefront in SoHo only flavored my impression.)

I particularly liked the LLC-Storefront assemblages (I couldn't afford one on this go-round), which are visible along the bottom row of the two photos right below, but I did get a tiny $20 painting that had a delightful image (Gordon Park's famous "American Gothic, Washington, D.C.") collaged in. (Check out his hat in the photo below too; it's part of his Shotgun series, just as t-shirt was part of his Ties series of paintings.) All of the pieces I saw offered stories, both readily apparent and more complexly embedded in them, a few of which Patrick-Earl expounded on for me.

Do check out his site; all his pieces are for sale, at reasonable prices for original artwork in New York.

Patrick-Earl's display, in SoHo


The display from another angle


Patrick-Earl and an admirer of his work

---

Though a fan of hiphop music, I never spent that much time in Fat Beats, the legendary underground hiphop music store on 6th Avenue, but I did stop in a few times over the years, and would often encounter the self-distributing, aspiring rappers as I passed below its windows on my way to NYU's campus, or in the opposition direction towards the PATH station on 9th St.

Like so much of 1990s New York City, and especially the West Village, Fat Beats has now closed its doors, in part because of the economic shifts in the music industry and because of the still-too-high cost of renting in Great Recession-era New York City. The store's closure underlines the impression I had of the very rocky state of affairs in NYC, despite all the official pronouncements. Just a few weeks ago I was on 8th Street, once the shoe bazaar to rival them all, and lighted up and lively well into the early hours, and not only was the block between 5th and 6th Avenues eerily dark, but it was somnolent as well. Yes, NYU has yet to start back up, but that wasn't a problem 5 and certainly not 10 years ago....