Music News

New York University’s Clive Davis Institute introduced a Lana Del Rey course for the 2022 fall semester, aimed at examining the alt-pop star’s relationship to feminism and connection to social justice movements.

 “Over the course of eight critically acclaimed albums, the six-time Grammy nominated artist has introduced a sad core, melancholic, and baroque version of dream pop that in turn helped shift and reinvent the sound (and mood) of mainstream music beyond the 2010s,” read a description of the course, officially titled “Topics in Recorded Music: Lana Del Rey.” “Through her arresting visuals and her thematic attention to mental health and tales of toxic, damaged love, Del Rey provided a new platform for artists of all genders to create ‘anti-pop’ works of substance that could live in a mainstream once categorized as bubblegum.”

A course on Kanye West was offered by Georgia State University in 2015, followed by another in 2017 at Washington University in St. Louis. Then five years later, Concordia University in Montreal brought the study of Ye to Canada with a course called “Kanye vs Ye: Genius by Design.”

“An opportunity to bring more amazing guests to the University and to discuss the world through the lens of one of the most influential artists of our generation,” said rapper and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman, who taught the course, in an Instagram post. “This class isn’t only about Kanye. It’s about community , creativity, responsibility, accountability, fame and mental health, dreams and and nightmares – and more importantly, self-actualisation.”

New York’s Skidmore College debuted a sociology course on Miley Cyrus in 2014, titled “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media.”

“Unfortunately, the way we talk about female pop stars and female bodies, class matters, gender matters, sexuality and sexual performance matters, but race matters a lot [too] and the way we talk about white pop stars is quite different than how we talk about the bodies of women of color,” said the course’s instructor, Professor Carolyn Chernoff. “[Cyrus] complicates representations of the female body in pop culture in some ways that are good, bad, and ugly.”

Two of the biggest Toronto-born artists had a college class dedicated to them in — guess where? Yup, Toronto. Canada’s X University (aka Ryerson University) introduced a course titled “Deconstructing Drake and The Weeknd” in the fall of 2021, aimed at dissecting the Canadian music scene’s representation and infrastructure problems that had both artists work on their careers in the U.S. instead of their home country.

“It’s time to get our Canadian rap & R&B icons recognized & canonized academically or otherwise,” wrote the course’s professor, Dalton Higgins, on Instagram. “And it is CRITICAL for scholars, historians, to examine the Toronto music scene that birthed Drake/Weeknd and helped create the conditions for them to become mega successful.”

There have been so many college courses dedicated to Beyoncé over the years, you’ll need a calculator to add them all up.

The release of Bey’s acclaimed album Lemonade in 2016 seemed to mark a turning point in how scholars regarded the 28-time Grammy winner. In fall of that year, Dr. Rachel Fedock taught a course at Arizona State University that compared Bey’s work to that of scholars such as Gloria Jean Watkins (aka bell hooks). The year after, Erik Steinskog taught a course titled “Beyoncé, Gender and Race” at the University of Copenhagen.

Other classes about Queen Bey have been taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and at California Polytechnic State University. Kinitra Brooks, who led a seminar on Lemonade at UT, went on to win a grant from the University of Michigan to create a reader/syllabus of her teachings.

“It’s a very southern Black woman tale using folklore in horror and conjuring,” Brooks told Billboard in 2017. “With Lemonade, Beyoncé walked into a conversation that’s been going on for 150 years within Black women’s networks.”

Rihanna represented one half of the subject matter in a class taught at University of Texas Austin called “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism.” Led by associate professor Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley, the course analyzed how both icons relate back to Black feminist principles.

“The wonderful thing about Beyoncé and Rihanna is that very few people have no feelings about them,” Tinsley told Texas Standard about the course. “People have strong feelings about them, some positive some negative. This is also a course that students are going to have strong opinions. To find a way for them in a large classroom to be able express those opinions, I think is going to involve some creativity. And perhaps things like doing some dance moves, right, to allow some room for expression of course.”

In July 2022, Texas State University unveiled a course all about Harry Styles and, more broadly, celebrity worship. “This course focuses on British musician Harry Styles and popular European culture,” read a description of the course. “To understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.”

The University of South Carolina offered a course called “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame” in spring of 2011, taught by professor/Little Monster Mathieu Deflem, who also penned the book of the same name. Aimed less at examining Gaga as a person and more at discussing her role as a social phenomenon, the course analyzed sociologically relevant aspects of her music, videos, fashion and more, according to BBC News.

In light of Britney Spears’ high-profile legal conservatorship case in 2021, William Paterson University in New Jersey introduced an online course aptly titled “#FreeBritney.” Using the “Toxic” singer’s situation as a culturally relevant core example, the class was designed to explore disability rights as they pertain to the legal system.

“I’m really excited about this class,” said professor Pamela Brillante in a post on the school’s site. “Guardianship/conservatorship is a disability rights issue. It’s all about who has autonomy and who gets to make their own decisions, because as adults, we’re allowed to make poor decisions.”

Swifties at New York University got the chance in spring 2022 to analyze Taylor Swift‘s progression as a creative music entrepreneur, her pop and country songwriting influences, how discourses of youth and girlhood are exploited in the media and music industry, and the politics of race in contemporary popular music in another Clive Davis Institute course taught by Rolling Stone staff writer Brittany Spanos.

At the end of that same semester, NYU presented the pop star with an honorary doctorate in fine arts at the the 2022 graduation ceremony and invited her to deliver that year’s commencement speech.

The very next semester, a course opened at the University of Texas that used Swift’s songbook as a means of introducing literary critical reading and research methods. “Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments,” read the course description.

In August 2023, Arizona State University announced a course called Psychology of Taylor Swift — Advanced Topics of Social Psychology, which will be taught by PhD student Alexandra Wormley. “The course is basically using Taylor Swift as a semester-long example of different phenomena — gossip, relationships, revenge,” she told ASU’s news site, emphasizing that “the class is not a seminar on how much we like or dislike her — we want to be able to learn about psychology.”