The Politics of Kanye West: Performances of a Wild Genius

3 units

As a hip-hop artist Kanye West has had unprecedented impact on the sonic force of music, fashion, politics, and videography. Coupling his controversial moments, with his corpus of musical texts with special focus on sonic production, this course illuminates Mr. West as a case studey for interrogating the interplay between fame, gender, sexuality, and race. Mostly, we explore how racialized ways of doing iconography, complex ways of seeing, creates a distorted or reductive frame through which we see the black and famous. Nonetheless, the course oscillates with entertaining these nuances, while being entertained by the decade-long catalogue of music and visual imagery. Together, we extract the Politics of Mr. West in his music and life, while also illuminating the importance of a politics of genius-making in the larger arc of black pop culture tradition.