Inspiring college courses is rarely thought of as a benchmark for songwriters, but with the works of Jay Z, Bruce Springsteen and 2Pac all being the focus of past classes at accredited universities, maybe it's time we start doing so. The latest college course centering around the lyrics of a musician is one called "Good Kid, Mad Cities," which is being offered this fall at Georgia Regents University, that's based on Kendrick Lamar's similarly-titled album.
According to SPIN, Professor Adam Diehl is teaching this English composition course, which will use good kid, m.A.A.d city as a starting point, and later cover works by "James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as the 1991 film, Boyz n the Hood."
Diehl said he chose the album for its focus on social issues: "With Kendrick's album, you've got gang violence, you've got child-family development in the inner city, you've got drug use and the war on drugs, you've got sex slavery, human trafficking — a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California."
To his critics, Diehl adds "What if people had said, we shouldn't study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they're too new?," he said. "Everything was new or too popular or too risqué at the time, but I just think that great stories last and the story of good kid, m.A.A.d city, is lasting."
[via]
