School Daze: The 10 Best Songs About College
As you head back to campus this fall, it's a good time to look at the best songs about college.
Image via Complex Original
The popular music canon of songs about college is a little more selective than the array of songs about, say, high school. That might be because high school is a more universal, formative youthful experience, easily evoking nostalgia. Or maybe it’s just that most musicians you’ve heard of spent their late teens and early twenties recording and touring, not studying. But as many of us either head back to campus this fall, or are filled with memories of our days at university, it’s a good time to look at the best songs about college. Whether they’re really about higher education, or just getting high in the dorms, each of these songs captures something crucial about what we go through in those four years… or five or six for those of us that were a little less driven.
RELATED: The 25 Best Songs About Death
Juicy J f/ A$AP Rocky - "Scholarship"
Juicy J is far from the first rapper to turn a certain cliché about strippers – that they’re working to earn their way through college, or at least claiming they are – into a song about making it rain with tuition money in the club. But he may be the first one to actually make a song that’s been spun into a promotional opportunity to actually offer a scholarship for twerking, as the Juiceman did last week in connection with “Scholarship,” the A$AP Rocky collaboration on his new album Stay Trippy. Partnering with WorldstarHipHop to offer $50,000 to pay for the education of “the best chick who can twerk” might not be the most politically correct way to encourage young women to go to college, but you have to admire Juicy for following through.
Kanye West - "School Spirit"
For Kanye West, titling his classic debut album The College Dropout was more of a statement of purpose about who he was and what kind of music he was making, not so much an indication of the album’s thematic content – which is largely about everything he did instead of staying in college. But he stayed on topic for one of the album’s centerpieces, “School Spirit,” and the two skits that bookend the song. After shouting out a bunch of Greek houses on the hook and catching the school spirit, West lays out how he chose the music industry over college with the classic couplet: “Told ‘em I finished school and I started my own business/ They say, ‘Oh you graduated?’ / No, I decided I was finished.”
J. Cole - "College Boy"
J. Cole has always worn his Kanye West influences on his sleeve, while also demonstrating one key difference between the two rapper/producers: Cole stayed in school, graduating magna cum laude from St. John’s University in 2007. The same year, the mixtape The Come Up jump-started the young scholar’s hip-hop career, trumpeting both his education and his extracurricular campus activities on “College Boy,” a freestyle over West’s beat for Lil Kim’s “Came Back For You.” At one point, Cole self-deprecatingly shrugs, “If this rap shit don’t work, I’m goin’ for my Masters.” These days, it seems like he’s good to just stick with that bachelor’s degree.
Steely Dan - "My Old School"
The Steely Dan brain trust of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker famously met as students at Bard College in upstate New York, and infamously wrote one of their biggest hits about their worst experience there. Both men, as well as Fagen’s girlfriend, were arrested in a raid on campus, and though charges were dropped, they continued to hold enough of a grudge to write “My Old School.” As specific as their grievance was, though, the song continues to resonate with anyone who has a good reason to shake their fist at the mention of their alma mater.
Snoop Dogg f/ Pharrell Williams & Uncle Charlie Wilson - "Beautiful"
The video for this hit from 2002’s Paid Tha Cost To Be Da Bo$ memorably depicted Snoop Dogg and Pharrell partying with beauties in an exotic Brazilian setting. But a listen to the lyrics reveals that Snoop’s mind was on a college cutie back in the States, or maybe several of them. In one of the oddly detailed tangents that Snoop verses sometimes indulge in, he envisions an amusing tableau of campus life: his college sweetheart is bumping Doggystyle and posting Snoop posters on the wall of her dorm room, prompting complaints from her roommate, “but girls like that wanna listen to Pat Boone.”
Vampire Weekend - "Campus"
The Columbia grads in Vampire Weekend have long been some of the most outwardly collegiate stars on indie rock’s A-list. But Ezra Koenig usually shows off his Ivy League education in lyrics more with literary cleverness and cultural references than in actually writing about college. The most memorable exception is “Campus,” a fan favorite from the band’s 2008 self-titled debut. The song has slice of life details like “sleeping on the balcony after class,” but it’s really about the downside of dating in college: after you break up with someone who goes to the same school, you still have to see them everywhere, every time you leave your dorm room.
Death Cab For Cutie - "We Looked Like Giants"
Like Ezra Koenig, Ben Gibbard is one of indie rock’s most learned and bookish lyricists, and he also has a song about the joys of campus sex, and the heartbreak that can follow: “Every Thursday I’d brave those mountain passes/ And you’d skip your early classes/ And we’d learn how our bodies worked.” In other words, the kinds of physical education you don’t earn credit hours from. The song is full of scene-setting details like college cars (“my grey subcompact,” where the once happy couple got it on, presumably because there was no privacy in the dorms), and a reference to a classic college rock band, The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Sammy Adams - "I Hate College"
Asher Roth’s breakout single “I Love College” was both one of the biggest odes to campus life in recent memory and a cue for other ‘frat rappers’ to come out of the woodwork. One of them, a keg-guzzler appropriately going by the name Sammy Adams, got a little fame by grabbing Roth’s hit and flipping it to be a little less peachy. Adams is still celebratory about hooking up and getting high, but crankier about “essays due at the end of each week,” while slurring out his melodic delivery in AutoTune to give the whole track a more drunken, lackadaisical feel than Roth’s crisp wordplay did on the original.
Travis Porter - "College Girl"
Right in the thick of Travis Porter’s run of twerk-ready club hits like “Make It Rain” and “Bring It Back,” the Atlanta trio slipped out this Big Fruit-produced jam on the 2011 mixtape Music Money Magnums. The sing-song chorus and gently strummed guitar on the track make it feel like some kind of odd attempt at connecting with the Sugar Ray crowd – one can almost picture John Belushi grabbing and smashing the acoustic in the middle of the song. But there’s something kind of endearing about Ali, Quez and Strap taking a break from getting turnt up to reminisce about some honey dips that went to Georgia Tech.
R.E.M. - "(Don’t Go Back) To Rockville"
One of Mike Mills’ most important songwriting contributions to R.E.M., perhaps the quintessential “college rock” band, evokes the unlikely emotion that can be caused by a college romance: dreading summer vacation. Mills began playing in the soon-to-be-legendary band in early 1980 in Athens, Georgia, around the same time he began dating local college student Ingrid Schorr. Her plans to spend the summer at her parents’ house in Rockville, Maryland sufficiently depressed Mills to inspire the song, in which the narrator turns his fears of a lonely summer into concerns for her future – “You’ll wind up in some factory” – if she ends up not returning to college in the fall.