Earlier this year, Rutgers made news for offering a course relating Beyonce's career to discussions about race, gender, and sexual politics. Around the same time, the University of Chicago and numerous other colleges around the United States staged "Sex Weeks" involving a variety of creatively-titled seminars. Today, NYU's making headlines for its new course, Sean Combs & Urban Culture. First class is Friday, Campus Reform reported
"No single personality dominated the landscape of urban mainstream popular culture in the 1990s (and since) more than producer, rapper and entrepreneur Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs," the course description's opening lines read.
The rest of the description briefly describes Comb's rise from an employee at Uptown Records to the richest man in the hip hop industry (net worth: $550 million). Students will learn how he impacted urban culture and how the culture impacted him.
The final lines mention "critical readings, viewings and listening assignments" used to analyze Combs' "brilliance, tragedy, strategy and serial entrepreneurship." Such a mix of information sounds like an interesting course. My guess is "critical readings" mean Rolling Stones articles and the like, though perhaps there is some small section of scholarly material relating to 1990s urban culture. At the least, there should be a bastion of write-ups, videos, and sound bites on the Tupac-Biggie conflict and Puff Daddy's previous legal problems.
Combs continues to serve as the CEO of Bad Boy Records. He's also been in a few films over the years (he has a small role in the upcoming "Draft Day") and most recently appeared on television screens in a Fiat commercial.
"Sean Combs & Urban Culture" qualifies as a History and Criticism Class in the school's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, accoridng to Campus Reform.
