Amplifier

Predicting the Syllabus for Georgetown’s Jay-Z Class

By | Amplifier – Thu, Oct 13, 2011 9:03 PM EDT

The University of South Carolina has their Lady Gaga course, the University of California Santa Cruz students can major in the Grateful Dead (sort of), and now Georgetown University is branching out into the blossoming field of pop music academia. This semester, the Hoyas can enroll in a three-credit course called "Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z." Professor Michael Eric Dyson told MTV's Rap Fix, "Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius. I admire the way in which he carries himself and the incredible craft that he displays every time he steps up to the microphone."

Somehow, the University of Kentucky didn't think of this first. Students lucky enough to secure a seat in this class haven't received their syllabi yet, but The Amp has a good guess about how the semester will shake down. Here are 10 topics that should be covered in Jigga 101:

• Crime and Punishment of an American Gangster: Analyzing how Fyodor Dostoyevsky's literary classic has informed Jay-Z's works.
• Kingdom Come: Drawing comparisons between Jay-Z's Roc Nation empire and feudalism during Charlemagne's reign.
• JeHOVAh: Is Jay-Z in the Illuminati?
• "Girls, Girls, Girls": Mating rituals in hip-hop and how on Earth did Jay-Z score Beyoncé
• "The City Is Mine": Charting the growth of Jay-Z's personal wealth by real estate investments (50/50 Club, Brooklyn's Barclays Arena).
• "Takeover," "Ether," and the Anatomy of a Beef: Exacerbating difficult workplace scenarios with song.
• "Empire State of Mind": The art of wearing a New York Yankees hat
• "Can I Live": Jay-Z and Existentialism.
• "Run This Town": Luxury-Rap in the Age of Recession
• "99 Problems": The Mathematics of Gender Relations.

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