Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city is already a hip-hop classic less than two years after its release.
The album not only holds some of the young decade's best radio hits ("Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe," "Swimming Pools (Drank)," "Money Trees") but also sells a legitimate storyline while making intelligent comments on race, gender, drug culture and hip-hop.
When it came time to create a new English Composition course for the fall semester at Georgia Regents University, instructor Adam Diehl decided to eschew the classics and focus on Lamar's album.
"What if people had said, we shouldn't study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they're too new?" Diehl told USA Today. "Everything was new or too popular or too risqué at the time, but I just think that great stories last and the story of good kid, m.A.A.d city, is lasting.
"With Kendrick's album, you've got gang violence, you've got child-family development in the inner city, you've got drug use and the war on drugs, you've got sex slavery, human trafficking - a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California."
Patrick Frits is a sociology and criminal justice major at the Augusta, Ga., university. He's now able to listen to Kendrick in his car and in the classroom.
"We're all from different backgrounds, we're all from different demographics, but we're all connecting together in the class over this," he said.
Lauren Ringel, another student, has found universality in Lamar's work.
"It's a little surreal because, of course, we don't live in the situation Kendrick Lamar grew up in, but it's almost like he's telling a story and then you have to step outside of that and realize he's not telling a story," she said. "He's telling about his life."
Diehl, the instructor, is a hip-hop head who is now lucky enough to compare and contrast the works of King Kendrick with the literary works of James Joyce, James Baldwin and Gwendolyn Brooks in the classroom.
"I think the main thing that hip-hop brings - it's the more journalistic art form within pop culture," he said. "Whether it's White Lines, which is about the cocaine epidemic in the '80s, or J. Coles' new song on the Mike Brown situation, hip-hop is about immediate feedback to the world people observe around them."
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