ON MONDAY Kendrick Lamar, a 30-year-old rapper from Compton, Los Angeles, won the Pulitzer prize for music. It was an extraordinary moment, and not just because it’s the first time the prize has been awarded to somebody who isn’t a classical or jazz musician. The jury awarded the prize to the wrong album.

“DAMN.”, the winning record, is “virtuosic”, just as the jurors say. Over the spare, stuttering beats of trap, a popular sub-genre of hip hop from the Deep South, Mr Lamar invites us to eavesdrop as he confesses to a host of sins—pride, lust, greed, anger, hypocrisy—as well as his fear of being judged, by his fire-and-brimstone God. Hip hop is still a genre that revels in braggadocio and conspicuous consumption, and Mr Lamar is no different from his peers. He understands temptation. But where some rappers look in the mirror and see playboy-gangsters, Lamar sees a sinner, tormented by his success and by his responsibility to those less fortunate than he is. His great talent is how, with his blazing lines, he makes us feel the heat of hellfire.

“DAMN.”, then, is most certainly virtuosic. The jury, however, also praised it for capturing “the complexity of modern African-American life”. Many of the experiences Lamar recounts will be familiar to those for whom racism and violence are daily realities: there’s the constant fear of being killed by a gang member or by the police, “‘cause that’s what you do when you’re 17”, and the desire for retribution that accompanies the news that a loved one has been murdered. Yet “DAMN.” is not an album about the complexity of modern African-American life so much as it is about the complexity of Mr Lamar’s inner life. The album cover is a portrait of a doleful Lamar, his head bent down, seemingly under the weight of his existential burden. On this album he turns inward, to consider the state of his soul.

But on his previous record, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015), his focus was wider. On the cover of that album, Lamar can hardly be made out among a crowd of young black men, who pose triumphantly in front of the White House. The record itself is similarly thronged with a varied cast of characters from the drama of African and black American history, from Kunta Kinte, a fictional 18th-century slave from Alex Haley’s novel “Roots”, to Nelson Mandela. As Tupac, a rapper, tells Lamar in an imaginary conversation, “We ain’t even really rappin', we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us.” These stories are about the daily terror of living under racism and the daily fight to counter it, even as veterans of the struggle burn out and give up. Channelling the history of black music with bursts of jazz, funk and soul (George Clinton and Ronald Isley contribute vocals), it helped to reinvigorate a black consciousness that had lain almost dormant in hip hop for years.

Though “DAMN.” was the best-selling album of 2017, none of its tracks has become emblematic of black consciousness, as “Alright”, a single off “Butterfly”, has. An ode to black resilience in the face not just of institutionally racist police forces but also crippling self-doubt, it would become an anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. That “Butterfly” resounded in such a way is proof of how honestly it captured what it means to be black in America today.

The Pulitzer prize for music rarely makes such a splash. It has already been argued that the medal, which has almost always gone to musicians working outside of the mainstream, needed Lamar’s victory more than he did. It’s just a shame that the board didn’t make their bid for relevance two years earlier, when the more deserving album could have been honoured.