College Professor Talks Kendrick Lamar Class, Hip-Hop and Michael Brown

In addition to his debut album, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” putting him on the map as one of the greatest lyricist of the younger hip-hop generation, Kendrick Lamar’s great body of work has also led him to earn a spot in the classroom of a few Georgia students.

This fall, freshman students at Georgia Regents University (GRU) will have the opportunity to study the Compton native’s body of work in their English composition course thanks to Professor Adam Diehl. Examining the young rapper’s unique story-telling ability alongside other literary bodies of work including James Baldwin Going to Meet the Man, James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gwendolyn Brooks Selected Poems and the 1991 film Boyz N The Hood, Diehl says that students will also discuss how K. Dot’s music catalog relates to current event issues of today, such as that of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.

BlackEnterprise.com caught up with Professor Diehl to get the inside scoop on what influenced him to teach this course, why Kendrick Lamar is a great hip-hop subject to study, and why “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” is a storyline that resonates with so many young black men today.

What prompted you to teach a class on “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City”?

I’ve been listening to the album for over a year and just had never really stopped listening to it and I talked about it all the time with my wife. We came to the conclusion that it’s a great literary work with narrative complexity. I decided that since I really liked talking about hip-hop in class, I might as well just add it to the syllabus.

The other works that I also chose [to study] are novels, short stories and poetry about kids growing up in mad cities.

Why do you think Kendrick Lamar is such a good subject to be studied in the classroom?

I think he is excellent at a lot of things. One of the best things that he does is raps from different points of view. For example in the song “Sing About Me,” the first verse is from his friend Dave’s brother. In the course of the album’s skit, Dave gets killed in a retaliation for a hit that some guys do to basically try to beat the crap out of Kendrick. Then Kendrick’s friends retaliate, but his friend Dave gets killed in the process. So from Dave brother’s point of view, Kendrick is rapping about “Hey, I’m thankful that you were there for my brother. You were there when he died and I won’t forget about that.” And then right as his verse is ending he says “If I die before the album drops” and then you hear gunfire and his life is cut short on record.

I just think it’s so compelling to listen to him switch in

and out of different voices, and sometimes it’s subtle and it still sounds like his rap delivery but you can tell it’s from someone else point of view. Whereas on a song like “Swimming Pools,” he will go into his own conscious and have the “open your mind up and listen to me Kendrick.” And I really like that because that’s just so different from what we would hear on a typical rap record, especially on “Sing About Me.” You almost never see multiple points of views from the same rapper.

Now, the storyline of the album, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” ties into a lot of current issues that are occurring today such as the Michael Brown situation. Will current topics like this also be discussed throughout the course?

It’s amazing that happened right before this semester started because I was going to link it to the Trayvon Martin situation and talk about how young black men are an endangered species. They don’t have the same outlook on life as their white, or Hispanic, or Asian counterparts and why is that? It’s because it’s not just fear of the police or fear of other races. It’s fear of the neighborhood, and fear of the forces bringing people down. I think Kendrick’s album does a great job of showing the danger of that, but also the enticement of that because when you’re 17-years-old you’re kind of on that threshold of “Do I just join with the status quo or do I try to be a difference maker?” I think Kendrick’s conclusion at the end of the album is “I’m going to be Kendrick Lamar and be myself and talk about what it’s like to live in Compton, but give kids hope.” He says in one of his songs, “Give them hope for being a lawyer or doctor, instead of a boy with a chopper holding the cul-de-sac hostage.”

Is this the first semester that Georgia Regents has had a hip-hop course?

Yes, and it’s basically just a freshman composition course. Every teacher has to do the same assignment where we give kids a research paper, but in terms of subject matter, every teacher gets to pick his or her own topic. So because they let us choose our topic I said, “What about this? Will this work?” And my department chair said “Yea, go for it. If it doesn’t work just try something else the next time.” It’s going pretty well so far and it just connects so much to what’s going on right now from a current events standpoint. There’s just so much interdisciplinary material to bring into the conversation and discussion and

ultimately we can analyze it in a more sophisticated way than just to say, “How does this look versus other rap? Or how does this look versus other literature?” You know that’s kind of a typical English course where you just discuss it in the realm of literature, versus now we can talk about how this is a journalistic document of life in Compton, California and has it foreshadowed or kind of predicted what will happen in our time now because it was a record that was set 10 years ago, but very much could have happened yesterday.

Are there any other artists whose work you would like to see studied in the classroom?

There are a lot of people that I would consider doing. I’m a pretty big Kanye West fan and I feel bad that I chose Kendrick before Kanye because I’ve been promoting Kanye for years. But I feel like Kanye would be more typical. You know there have been courses on Nas, Jay Z and Tupac and Kanye kind of fits that mold a little bit better in terms of looking at his work as a whole. I was considering talking about Kanye’s work and Chicago because I thought it would be cool to have a whole class about the city of Chicago and [study] novels, movies and music all about that city.