There’s a new course at Washington University in St.
Louis focused on everything Kanye West.
Confirming to Billboard, Professor Jeffrey McCune,
‘Seventy-five students are currently registered for
“Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic
Aesthetics,”a course which began this week and there’s
a waiting list to sign up for the class’.
The course description reads ‘Kanye West As a hip-hop
artist Kanye West has had unprecedented impact on the
sonic force of music, fashion, politics, and videography.
Coupling his controversial moments, with his corpus of
musical texts with special focus on sonic production,
this course illuminates Mr. West as a case study for
interrogating the interplay between fame, gender,
$exuality, and race.
Mostly, we explore how racialized ways of doing
iconography, complex ways of seeing, creates a
distorted or reductive frame through which we see the
black and famous.
Nonetheless, the course oscillates with entertaining
these nuances, while being entertained by the decade-
long catalogue of music and visual imagery. Together,
we extract the ‘Politics of Mr. West’ in his music and
life, while also illuminating the importance of apolitics
of genius-making in the larger arc of black pop culture
tradition.’
This won’t be the first college course about Kanye. In
2014, the University of Missouri offered a course
focused on Kanye and Jay Z. That course explored three
main themes, including where West and Hov fit within,
and how they changed the history of hip-hop music.
