Top 10 Pop Stars Who Have Had Colleges Teach a Dedicated 'Class' About Them
Pop Icons in the Classroom: When College Courses Go Melodic
The monotony of traditional academic subjects takes a backseat as universities globally embrace an innovative approach to education, inculcating pop culture icons into their curriculum. How cool it will be to dissect Taylor Swift's lyrics, and figure out all the easter eggs rather than calculus or studying Kanye West’s impact on pop culture rather than biology. Several universities now offer courses dedicated to the cultural significance and songwriting skills of modern-day pop icons. This trend highlights a shift in academia, acknowledging musicians.
1. Lana Del Rey
New York University’s Clive Davis Institute started a course in the fall of 2022 focused on Lana Del Rey’s contribution to alt-pop, navigating her unique blend of sadcore, melancholy, and baroque dream pop. “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 the description of the course Topics in Recorded Music: Lana Del Rey.
2. Kanye West
Kanye West’s influence expanded beyond the music industry, nudging Georgia State University in 2015, Washington University in St. Louis in 2017, and Concordia University in Montreal in 2022 to offer courses focused on unraveling the complexities of his artistry. Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman who taught the course asserted, “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. This class isn’t only about Kanye. It’s about community, creativity, responsibility, accountability, fame and mental health, dreams and nightmares – and more importantly, self-actualization.”
3. Miley Cyrus
Skidmore College in New York introduced a sociology course in 2014 titled The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media. The course was led by Professor Carolyn Chernoff, she added, “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. [Cyrus] complicates representations of the female body in pop culture in some ways that are good, bad, and ugly.”
4. Drake and The Weeknd
Toronto's X University, also known as Ryerson University, initiated a course titled Deconstructing Drake and The Weeknd in 2021. The course navigates the infrastructure and representation challenges within Canadian music. “It’s time to get our Canadian rap & R&B icons recognized & canonized academically or otherwise. 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.” Dalton Higgins, the course’s professor wrote on social media.
5. Beyoncé
Beyoncé has become a classic in academia, with several courses dedicated to her. Since the release of Lemonade in 2016, the University of Arizona, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Texas at San Antonio, California Polytechnic State University, and many more have explored the cultural and social prominence of Queen Bey’s work. “It’s a very southern Black woman tale using folklore in horror and conjuring. With Lemonade, Beyoncé walked into a conversation that’s been going on for 150 years within Black women’s networks.” Brooks shared with Billboard at the time.
6. Rihanna
Rihanna represented one-half of the subject matter in a class taught at the University of Texas Austin labeled, Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism. It was taught by associate professor Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley. “The wonderful thing about Beyoncé and Rihanna is that very few people have no feelings about them. 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 to 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.” Tinsley remarked.
7. Harry Styles
Texas State University introduced a course in July 2022 exploring Harry Styles and more vastly, celebrity worship. “This course focuses on British musician Harry Styles and popular European culture. 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 description of the course read. The course is titled, Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture.
8. Lady Gaga
The University of South Carolina offered a course called Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame in the spring of 2011, taught by professor /Little Monster Mathieu Deflem, who also wrote the book of the same name. It aimed less at exploring Gaga as a person and more at discussing her role as a social phenomenon. "We're going to look at Lady Gaga as a social event. So it's not the person, and it's not the music. It's more this thing out there in society that has 10 million followers on Facebook and six million on Twitter. I mean, that's a social phenomenon." Deflem remarked.
9. Britney Spears
As per Billboard, amid Britney Spears’ high-profile legal conservatorship case in 2021, William Paterson University in New Jersey launched an online course aptly titled #FreeBritney. Professor Pamela Brillante who taught the class exclaimed, “I’m really excited about this class. 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.” The course used the singer’s situation as a culturally relevant core example, the class was designed to explore disability rights.
10. Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift's popularity led to multiple courses at universities like New York University, the University of Texas, Arizona State University, UC Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Florida, and Stanford. The course description went like“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,”
