When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis—receive a nod. Lamar’s victory, for his moodily propulsive album “damn.,” elicited some reactionary fuming—one irate commenter said that his tracks were “neurologically divergent from music”—as well as enthusiastic assent from younger generations. The thirty-one-year-old composer Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist this year, told Slate, “I never thought my string quartet and an album by Kendrick Lamar would be in the same category. This is no longer a narrow honor.”
Lamar’s win made me think about the changing nature of “distinguished musical composition,” to use the Pulitzer’s crusty term. Circa 1950, this was understood to mean writing a score for others to perform, whether in the guise of the dissonant hymns of Charles Ives or the spacious Americana of Aaron Copland. But that definition was always suspect: it excluded jazz composers, whose tradition combines notation and improvisation. In 1965, a jury tried to give a Pulitzer to Duke Ellington, but the board refused. Within classical composition, meanwhile, activity on the outer edges had further blurred the job description. By the early fifties, Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henry were creating collages that incorporated recordings of train engines and other urban sounds; Karlheinz Stockhausen was assisting in the invention of synthesized sound; John Cage was convening ensembles of radios. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j. Du Yun, Kate Soper, and Ashley Fure, the Pulitzer finalists in 2017—I served on the jury—make use, variously, of punk-rock vocals, instrumentally embroidered philosophical lectures, and architectural soundscapes. Such artists may lack the popular currency of Lamar, but they are not cloistered souls.
Yet feminism has not done a good enough job articulating what alternate strategies of reprodction may be. In part this is a problem of thought, in part a problem of genre. From Firestone to Haraway to Laboria Cuboniks (an anti-naturalist, gender-abolitionist collective of “daughters of Haraway”), the manifestos issued by feminists often call for universal access to reproductive technologies, biotechnical interventions, hormones, and “endocrinological knowhow” (including about gender hacking). What necessarily gets lost in these manifestos’ universalizing are the differences in how particular technologies calibrate particular peoples’ experiences of reproduction and care; how they bring to light vast structural inequalities of time, money, kinship, health care, legal protections, and bodily integrity; and how, when these inequalities become palpable enough, the desire to reproduce naturally can undercut a progressive politics of reproduction.
To appreciate all this—and to figure out what to do about it—we need narrative.
The summer after my senior year of high school, I’d been accepted into seven colleges, but I didn’t know if I could go to any of them. My financial aid wasn’t settled, and I was poor. I couldn’t go if I didn’t get some grants or loans (this was in the 1990s, when school lending was more conservative), so while I waited, I got a job as a waitress, working the graveyard shift at the local diner.
It was a discouraging time. I desperately wanted to leave the rural town I grew up in, and college seemed the way out. So, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was on my mind as I memorized the restaurant menu and counted my tips. I kept thinking about the tin can Francie’s mother “nailed to the floor in the darkest corner of the closet,” where they put “half of any money they got from anywhere.” One crisis after another forces them to empty the can. I knew a similar frustration.
The Only Girl perhaps couldn’t be viewed as a definitive book on the burgeoning rock’n’roll era, or even on Rolling Stone, as it has an eccentric, wilful, albeit charming, tendency to weave, back and forth, through time zones, with Green mulling and remulling (and even re-re-mulling) on people, events and thoughts, seemingly as the mood takes her. Not that it matters – there are already books on Rolling Stone, and on the era, the majority of which are written by men. This one is about a woman navigating the uncharted territory of her crazy expanding new world, not only armed with the requisite “groovy” access-all-areas pass, but also the self-awareness, humour, and resilience that an “only girl” needs.