Washington University Offers Full College Course on Kanye West
As an undergrad attending college so you can presumably learn the skills it’ll take to succeed in “the real world,” you may be shocked to see some of the courses offered while trying to pick future classes to take/blow-off, such as *searches for two seconds* the “Biology of Jurassic Park” or “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus.” If you attend St. Louis’s Washington University, you can get in on the course “Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic Aesthetics,” provided you can get past the course’s growing waiting list.
According to The St. Louis Dispatch, 75 students have currently registered for the lesson. Guess it pays to not wait until the last second to enroll in classes. The course’s professor, Dr. Jeffrey McCune, says the course isn’t about either gushing over, or pissing on, West’s music, but rather sees the artist as a “good way to get students to connect issues of politics, race, gender, sexuality and culture.”
McCune claims he’s had the idea for a long time. “I always wanted to teach a course looking at black genius and the impossibility of black genius for the American public,” he said to The Dispatch. “We’re always thought of as maybe being articulate or smart but not really genius…Kanye really uses hip-hop as a vehicle to display all of his talents, albeit some better than others.”
[youtube ytid=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMqlXJNNQ5o&w=680&h=440%5D
The course, which will have lectures on Tuesdays, and “critical listening parties,” with occasional guests artists on Thursdays, has topics on its syllabus that include:
• “Who is Kanye West and Why Is He in the Flashing Lights?”
• “Touch the Sky, When the Aspirant Turns Genius”
• “Father Stretch My Hands, or How Hip-Hop Takes Us to Church”
• “Love Lock Down, or Hip-Hop’s Queer Love Languages”
• “I Love Kanye, or How Critique Slips Into Hate”
McCune also says that “The Swift Moment,” Kanye’s 2009 on-stage confrontation with Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs, will have its own full segment. Not coincidentally, McCune is also currently working on a book “on Kanye West.”
This isn’t nearly the first time hip hop-has infiltrated the ranks of academia, as this list of past examples proves.
