If you don’t know anything about two of the biggest artists from the city of Toronto, Canada, Drake, and The Weeknd
, you can now take a course to find out!Toronto author and publicist Dalton Higgins, who is a music professor in residence at Ryerson University, also known as X University, announced the course he will be teaching in early 2022 on his Instagram account.
“Real talk, I’ve been lecturing about hip hop and popular culture at North American universities, – including all the local ones; University of Toronto, York University, etc.- for the last decade. When I wasn’t doing that, I was pushing Hip Hop Pedagogy in high schools, writing chapters and lesson plans for various hip hop textbooks.
“But the real fun
& deep learning has only really just begun as I’ll be teaching a course about two Toronto-born music titans; Drake & The Weeknd in early 2022. Students at Ryerson University will now be able to take a course that delves into two of Toronto’s most influential artists in the music industry: Drake and The Weeknd. The course, titled Deconstructing Drake & The Weeknd, will study the artists’ careers and lyrics.”Higgins tells Now Toronto that Drake and the Weeknd are two of the biggest artists in the world and it’s overdue for them to be canonized academically. He feels that the two artists who come from the Toronto scene should be celebrated in the city that birthed them.
“When you have two Black artists born and bred in Toronto who perform rap, R&B and pop, and who are arguably well on their way to becoming billionaires at some point in time, there is apparently a lot
to learn,” he says. “Remember, they both blew up despite being products of a local Canadian music scene that does very little to foster the growth of its Black music practitioners.”