By Tony Nwanne
A new course at Washington University in St. Louis, U.S. will see students examine the world and life of superstar rapper, Kanye West.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 75 third-year students have registered for “Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic Aesthetics”.
Jeffrey McCune, professor, says the course which began this week will focus on the rapper, producer and fashion designer.
He noted that it will offer a way for students to connect issues of politics, race, gender, sexuality and culture.
It’s not the first college course about West. Georgia State University offered one in 2015, and a 2014 course at the University of Missouri focused on West and Jay Z.
“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, sexuality, 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 West’ in his music and life, while also illuminating the importance of a politics of genius-making in the larger arc of black pop culture tradition,” said the course description.
