Kanye vs. Everybody’: GSU prof. gets academic with Yeezy

A kinder, gentler Kanye appeared on the Breakfast Club this morning. Even Charlemagne the God — who got ‘Ye so riled up the last time he visited New York’s Power 105 morning show that his following interview with Sway in the Morning yielded the infamous “You ain’t got the answers, Sway!” outburst — complimented him on his calm, seemingly media-trained demeanor. (For the record, Kanye’s publicist and newly promoted Def Jam Executive Vice President Gabe Tesoriero, was in the building. Though off-camera, Kanye can be seen addressing him once during the interview.) 
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? But that’s beside the point of this post. Then again, maybe not. 
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? Lest we forget, West had a helluva last week. He refrained from blowing up Beck on the Grammy mainstage during his Album of the Year acceptance, only to blow him up in interviews immediately following the show. Beyonce shoulda won, he said. And apparently the Beygency agreed. But Beck’s fans have agency, too, as they proved with a week’s worth of social media threads and think pieces that debated the cultural significance of either/or. Funny thing is West admits with a laugh in the Breakfast Club interview that he hadn’t even heard Beck’s album until he was out to dinner since the show with Taylor Swift and it was playing in the restaurant. That definitely was not a coincidence.
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?But that’s not the point of this post. Then again, maybe it is. 
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? Turns out, there’s a professor at Georgia State University who deems Kanye such a pivotal cultural figure that he’s teaching a class in his honor. In “Kanye Versus Everybody: Black Poetry and Poetics from Hughes to Hip-Hop,” GSU’s Scott Heath “examines ‘Ye as an artist and public figure, from his beginnings as an outsider desperate to muscle his way in to his current place as the ultimate culture-controller,” according to the Fader. 
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? In particular, the good doctor pays critical attention to dissecting Kanye as a media figure, per Fader’s Rawiya Kameir:
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? ?? “He is among our most prominent and dynamic public thinkers working today,” says Heath. “You can detect his real awareness of himself as a represented, even mediated body.
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? His relationship with the press is, to the say the least, fraught. But as a “metacritical thinker,” that dynamic is complex and layered. “He’s aware of the criticism and the critiques that come his way, and he then critiques those critiques. This is a guy who gives interviews where the entire interview is about another interview that he gave earlier,” says Heath, pointing to conversations with Jimmy Kimmel and Ricky Smiley as examples. “That, to me, is very keenly discursive.” ?? It is interesting to watch this latest interview in light of all that. Take particular note of how much more measured he is in attempting to articulate his message. Even his return to this show speaks volumes about mastery at managing his image, especially the week following the long-awaited, polarizing release of his Yeezy collaboration with Adidas and those Ugg-looking boots. 
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? While Heath’s course is rooted in American poetry, it’s obviously more than that: 
? ?? “It’s not just poetry, but also the ways that we use language, discuss language, think through language,” he explains. Other black public figures who have used language to similar effect as Kanye are touchpoints in the class, too: Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Richard Sherman, and, more recently, Marshawn Lynch. “Kanye really wants to control his image. He wants to control his reputation. And, you know, it’s off-putting for some, just like how Marshawn Lynch is off-putting for some,” he says.
? ?? He joins a growing number of professors currently teaching hip-hop-based classes in Atlanta colleges and universities, such as Regina Bradley, who hosted her public discourse series “OutKasted Conversations” via Google Hangout last year, and Marc Lamont Hill, who recently joined the faculty of Morehouse College’s African American Studies Department from Columbia Univer—
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? We gon’ let them finish, but this Kanye West class might be one of the best college courses of ALLLLLL TIIIIIIIME!!!! Better yet, imagine sitting in the back of the professor’s class every other day yelling, “You ain’t got the answers, Scott!!!!” Yeah, sign me up.