Next time you drag yourself out of bed for your 8:30 a.m. bio-chem section on polypeptide physiology, ask yourself if you’d rather stumble into a lecture titled “The Life and Death of Tupac Shakur Part I.”
Done. This spring, the history and kinesiology departments will team up for an unprecedented 6-credit section combining the courses “The African American in Sport” and “History of African American Popular Culture: Rap, Race, and Identity Reality.” For the first time at LSU, the joint sections become available this week as scheduling for the Spring semester gets underway.
“Nothing like this has ever gone down at any research university in the South,” said Leonard Moore, a history professor and author of “Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power.”
“This, in many ways, is very cutting edge,” he said. “When you look at the influence of race and sports and hip hop on American culture as a whole, it’s very interesting. That’s what we want to get at through this course.” Students interested in the class must register for both the kinesiology and history courses which will run back-to-back from 9 a.m. to noon on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the spring. The joint sections hope to engender a cultural learning community through which students will learn more than if they had taken the stand-alone courses.
“Students take courses in so many different areas, so many different departments.” Moore said. “So we said, ‘Hey these two courses have similar content, let’s put them together to enhance the overall learning experience.’ Since students have to register for both classes, you get to put a community of scholars together.”
Moore is no stranger to hip-hop. Currently piloting a course on the history of Black Nationalism, he twice taught a history course called “Hip-hop Culture” at LSU. He believes hip-hop to be an important cultural touchstone both nationally and internationally, certainly worthy of scholarship from a historical standpoint.
“I like to teach hip-hop because I grew up with hip-hop, and hip-hop has really expanded over the last decade or so and has really become not only a mainstay in American culture, but in global culture as well,” he said. “And we’re also dealing with an economic component, too. Hip-hop generates large amounts of money. We’ll start off looking at the history and influence of hip-hop, then we’ll bring it up to 2000. What we want to deal with is its intersection with American culture.”
If that entails rehashing Ice T’s feud with the South Central cops, so be it. One lecture examines the rise of Sean “Puffy” Combs and his Bad Boy label while another dissects Public Enemy and Nation-conscious rap. Above all, expect Moore to address each topic with voracious clarity as he drops the magnifying glass on a cultural movement that has become an American legacy.
Oh, and rumor has it Flavor Flav will guest-lecture.