Remember that new Kanye West class offered at The University of Missouri last year? Well, Georgia State now offers a similar course -- "Kanye West vs. Everybody: Black Poetry and Poetics From Hughes to Hip-Hop" -- and the professor recently explained why he thinks it's a good idea.
"I think that young writers around the world-and especially young black writers-are more prolific than they've ever been," Dr. Scott Heath told FADER (via HipHopDX). "It just so happens that they're writing to a beat."
Kanye is an obvious choice to build a class around; he's connected to several spheres of the African American consumer industry, from music to fashion to television.
"He's one of the few musicians that you get to hear actually talk about hip-hop as art," Dr. Heath said. "He talks about designing culture-not just designing fashion, but designing culture,"
According to the syllabus, the course aims to "investigate the continuous development of African American poetry and poetics-the uses of language and literature to represent blackness and Americanness in particular-observing shifting meanings in and of the text with important considerations of race, class, gender, and sexuality."
Heath believes that West and the rest of modern hip-hop culture have helped promote young minorities' writing abilities.
That Missouri course from 2014 focused on the following pillars: "(1) Where do [Kanye & Jay Z] fit within, and how do they change, the history of hip-hop music? (2) How is what they do similar to and different from what poets do?, and (3) How does their rise to both celebrity and corporate power alter what we understand as the American dream?"
There's no way to measure this, but we're guessing nobody skips either of these classes.
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