Hip Hop and post secondary education systems around the world have been coming in contact with each other for some time now. Nas and Harvard teamed up to establish the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship, ?uestlove has been teaching a music appreciation course at NYU, and in 2012 The University of Arizona introduced Americas first Hip-Hop Minor.
The University of Missouri is now adding their name to the list of schools giving attention to the often under-appreciated genre. The English department of the school will be offering a course simply titled: Jay-Z and Kanye West.
The description of the course is below:
This course looks at the career and work of Jay-Z and Kanye West from three perspectives: (1) Where do they 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? In addition to listening to music and watching videos, we will also read Jay-Z's Decoded; histories of and critical works on rap music by Jeff Chang, Adam Bradley, and others; and one or two good studies of how poetry works.
One song that they will certainly be looking at is Yeezy's "Big Brother," which you can watch a performance of below.
Photo:telegraph.co.uk