Jay-Z officially has it all. He’s got his own basketball team, record label, clothing line, superstar wife, 99 problems, and now, a class at Georgetown University dedicated to his life story!
This semester, students are studying the social commentary behind his lyrics at the Washington D.C. campus in a class called Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor who has also taught classes about music icons Tupac and Marvin Gaye, believes that the rapper’s work as a basis is the perfect way to study sociological issues including racial and gender identity, sexuality, capitalism and economic inequality in America.
In fact, Dyson thinks Jay-Z, who started his life in a poor Brooklyn housing project and is now a multimillionaire, is “an icon of American excellence.”
Not everyone in the academic community agrees that Jay-Z is worthy of becoming course material.
Stephen Wu, a Junior at the school, dismissed the class as “poppycock” in an opinion piece published in a student newspaper, reading:
“It speaks volumes that we engage in the beat of Carter’s pseudo-music while we scrounge to find serious academic offerings on Beethoven and Liszt. We dissect the lyrics of Big Pimpin’, but we don’t read Spenser or Sophocles closely.”
Good point. However, the class sounds like more fun than Western Religions or Advanced Calculus in our opinion! LOLz!
Would U enroll in a college course centered around the life of a musician or other pop culture icon?
[Image via WENN.]