Southernplayalisticadillacschoolbooks.
Armstrong State University in Savannah, GA has a new course celebrating some of the state’s finest writers: Outkast.
A literature class called Outkast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South is now being offered by professor Dr. Regina Bradley, who is aiming to show how the duo’s “ideas about the South and southernness seep into other Southern writers.”
“My areas of interest are African-American literature and popular culture,” Dr. Bradley told the Savannah Morning News. “Often, students get most of their information, their outlook from how they engage in popular culture… ”
She adds: “I also don’t want to overlook or shun the folks who aren’t familiar with hip-hop at all. I’m pretty sure I have a couple of folks in there who have no clue who Outkast is or don’t listen to hip-hop at all, which is why they’re there — they want to learn something different.”
Bradley was a Ph.D. student and a Nasir Jones fellow at Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute and will have her students write “a paper that’s 12-15 pages… what I call a ‘nerdy hip-hop review’. They’ll take an album of their choice — preferably an Outkast album — and give a discussion of the themes and what they hear.”
We’ll bet you could finagle some extra credit if you write about Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music, tho.
Read next: The 50 best Outkast tracks
[via The FADER]