After years of releasing chart-topping albums and record-breaking hits, Drake and The Weeknd will now be the subjects of a college course, which will be taught in their native hometown of Toronto, Canada. According to multiple news outlets, podcaster and hip hop connoisseur Dalton Higgins will teach RTA 950: Deconstructing Drake and The Weeknd at Ryerson University in early 2022.
The course will reportedly dive into the careers of Drizzy and The Weeknd, and their roles in Toronto’s hip hop and R&B scene. Per a recent Instagram post about the class, Higgins explained that his decision to focus on the two pop stars came after noticing great existing courses about Miley Cyrus, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Outkast, JAY-Z and Beyoncé, opportunities to focus on hip hop in college, and courses being taught by the likes of producer 9th Wonder and The Roots’ own Questlove.
With the academic landscape incorporating music, specifically hip hop, into college curriculums, he believed it was only right for Drake and The Weeknd to get some respect in the classrooms.
“It’s time to get our Canadian rap & R&B icons recognized & canonized academically or otherwise,” he wrote in his Instagram post. “And it is CRITICAL for scholars, historians, to examine the Toronto music scene that birthed Drake/Weeknd and helped create the conditions for them to become mega successful.”
“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…,” Higgins added in a statement.
“What is it that made these particular artists stand out from the pack of thousands of cross-genre musicians from here from a marketing perspective? Are they doing things a little differently? What’s their business acumen and entrepreneurial zest like? Did race, gender, class, faith play into any of this? Drake and The Weeknd are both real human beings, which means that like most humans, they are going to do, and say intriguing and confounding things, so we’ll peel back the layers on some of that [too].”
See Dalton Higgins’ post below.