It was announced on April 16, 2018 that rapper Kendrick Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In a society where awards seemingly get distributed like water bottles after a natural disaster, sometimes the gravity of these awarding bodies gets lost in the shuffle. This was not a Grammy nor a BET or MTV […]
Read more "When Black Culture Goes Mainstream"This has been an interesting moment in time for blackness. The imperfect harmony of the nightmare that police brutality against black bodies along with the exoneration of whiteness and the beauty of black pride and some semblance of existential unity hearkening to years past. Two hallmarks of this time period have been both Kendrick Lamar […]
Read more "If Ta-Nehesi Coates and Kendrick Lamar Had a Conversation…"One of the challenges of doing cultural criticism is when the critic begins to infer their own meaning onto something that was not intended by the author or the creator of the work. With my theological background, we learned about textual criticism when it came to the exegetical work of the biblical literature. One […]
Read more "Kendrick Lamar and Black Hip Hop Masculinity"On Tuesday, August 13th, 2013, Kendrick Lamar, up and coming West Coast rapper who burst onto the scene with mixtapes that got rave reviews and an album good kid m.A.A.d city that stays in heavy rotation when I hit the road, dropped a guest verse on Big Sean’s Control album that included the following lines: I heard […]
Read more "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Hip Hop: Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z and Harry Belafonte"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 