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Kendrick Lamar’s critical and commercial darling good Kid m.A.A.d city is renowned for its storytelling and complexity, so it’s no surprise that one English teacher from Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia has launched an English composition class inspired by Kendrick’s breakthrough album. The class examines works of literature that involve young people growing up in numerous cities, including Compton. The class is entitled “Good Kid, Mad Cities” and studies James Joyce, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the 1991 movie Boyz N The Hood, alongside Kendrick’s album as its primary sources of material.
Adam Diehl, the lecturer behind the class, told HipHopDX that he wanted to focus on Kendrick’s m.A.A.d city because of the “continuing focus on the city of his upbringing—Compton.” The class aims to improve the writing, reading, and analyzing skills of its students, as well as allowing them to become a “better appreciator of the language of the street: hip-hop.” Diehl said that he was given the chance to create his own theme for a class, and that he chose Kendrick’s album because he believes he’s, “the James Joyce of hip-hop.”
Students will be tasked with analyzing the album of the other sources of material and writing a research paper on issues including gang warfare, racism, human trafficking, police brutality, and incarceration rates. Diehl told HipHopDX, “The class will hopefully produce much discussion about the issues that Joyce/Baldwin/Brooks/Singleton/Lamar raise, and hopefully the content of the class will inspire students to find an outlet to bring some sanity to our own mad city–Augusta.”
Hip-hop albums are no stranger to analysis in education, but good kid, m.A.A.d city is perhaps the the first time an album so recently released has had a class focused around it. Diehl explained: “The narrative complexity, the structure, the allusions, the subject matter, the characters, and most of all the message make good kid, m.A.A.d city worthy of university status.”
There aren’t many albums that you can confidently say that about. Kendrick Lamar is slated to release his follow-up to m.A.A.d city later this year.
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(HipHopDX)
