Outkast has always been a little too funky to be backpack rap, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of deeper analysis. That’s exactly what Armstrong State University professor Regina Bradley hopes to due with her new course, “Outkast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South.”
Bradley says the course at the Savannah, Georgia-based college will focus on how the group’s “ideas about the South and southernness seep into other Southern writers.” The professor — who is currently writing a book on the group — said that she wants students to learn to dissect hip-hop themes and learn how the music can be used as a form of political expression. She also hopes that the course will give students an updated idea of what it means to be southern.
“We’re stuck in outdated approaches and discussions of what is and what isn’t southern,” she told Armstrong student paper The Inkwell. “I think it is important for students, both native and non-native southerners, to understand and study how the South has changed in the last 50 years.”
When Three Stacks said that the South has something to say we doubt he thought he’d be saying it to a lecture hall full of liberal arts majors.
