I will be the first to say that I am a bit high maintenance. I can usually be seen with my five rings, and I generally look well put together 90% of the time.

(The other 10% is when I am attending classes.)

So, due to my bougie and prim and proper attitude, it surprises many people that I love rap music. It is also unfathomable to most how I could be such a hardcore feminist, and yet I still bump rap in my car.

When I am in my car, my passengers can fully expect a full concert from anyone to A Tribe Called Quest to Eminem to LL Cool J to the love of my life, Kendrick Lamar.

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is a young rapper from Compton, California, one of the most volatile locations in the United States. At only 30, he was recently awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, the only recipient to do so associated with rap music.

I can still remember the first time I heard a Kendrick Lamar song. I was a young freshman in high school, and my longtime boyfriend had a song from Section.80, “Rigamortus”, as his ringtone.

This was back when you could still easily download ringtones to your phone. 2011 already feels a million years ago.

I was listening to these lyrics: “And this is rigor mortis, and it’s gorgeous when you die.”

I’m with my boyfriend, and we’re cruising around our suburb of Dallas, so far removed from real strife and trauma and the powerful prose that Lamar is known for, and I’m completely taken aback.

Most of this early album’s subject matter concerns the drug epidemic of cocaine in Black communities during Reagan’s presidency, and Kendrick explains that even if you were just born in the 1980s, you are implicitly also defined by this important time in our nation’s history.

In this particular song, he is explaining that now your favorite rapper is dead. Kendrick has killed all of them. He’s young, hungry, and he is not here for your weak rap.

I firmly believe that with this historic win, and especially by someone so young, that this will cement rap music’s important and vital storytelling ability in our current political climate. From the beginning, rap music has been both a blend of a call to the future and connection to the past.