A Lana Del Rey course is coming to New York University in October.
‘Topics in Recorded Music: Lana Del Rey’ will be offered at NYU from October 20 to December 8 at the Clive Davis Institute.
Kathy Iandoli, renowned music journalist, author and professor of Music Business at the college, is teaching the course.
A description reads: “Over the course of eight critically-acclaimed albums, the six-time Grammy nominated artist has introduced a sad core, melancholic, and baroque version of dream pop that in turn helped shift and reinvent the sound (and mood) of mainstream music beyond the 2010s.
“Through her arresting visuals and her thematic attention to mental health and tales of toxic, damaged love, Del Rey provided a new platform for artists of all genders to create ‘anti-pop’ works of substance that could live in a mainstream once categorised as bubblegum.”
The Lana course comes after a songwriting course based on the work of Taylor Swift was announced for this year at the University of Texas at Austin.
‘The Taylor Swift Songbook’ will be read alongside classics such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the North American college, and will strive to “introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines” to students.
A description on the university’s website reads: “Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualisation as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments.”
The’ Shake It Off’ hitmaker received an honorary doctorate from New York University after being recognised by the college as “one of the most prolific and celebrated artists of her generation.”
Meanwhile, a separate university in Texas announced back in July that a course titled ‘Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture’, will be on offer from 2023.
At the time, Dr. Louie Dean Valencia of Texas State University shared: “This course focuses on British musician Harry Styles and popular European culture to understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.”
