Georgia University Offers Class on Outkast, Southern Hip Hop

Beginning this semester, students in one of Dr. Regina Bradley’s upper level English courses at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia were offered the opportunity to take a course on hip hop titled “OutKast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South.”

In the course, students will listen to and analyze Outkast’s albums as well as other Southern-based rap music and will also examine the role hip hop plays in forming contemporary political movements like Black Lives Matter.

“My areas of interest are African-American literature and popular culture,” Bradley told Savannahnow.com. “I try to find ways to connect those… Often, students get most of their information, their outlook from how they engage in popular culture.”

Bradley, who was a Nasir Jones hip-hop fellow at Harvard University’s Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, said the course will focus on how Outkast’s “ideas about the South and southernness seep into other Southern writers.

“Their final project is doing a paper that’s 12-15 pages … for what I call a ‘nerdy hip-hop review,’” Bradley said. “They’ll take an album of their choice — preferably an Outkast album — and give a discussion of the themes and what they hear.”

Outkast— made up of André 3000 and Big Boi — won multiple Grammy awards for their 2000 album Stankonia and 2003’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Although the duo has not dropped an album in about a decade, they still have a huge influence on hip hop. André has been a featured artist on several albums over the last few years — including A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 album We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service. Big Boi has put out two solo albums and teamed with New York electronica duo Phantogram for last year’s Big Grams album.