Ryerson University’s The Creative School will be offering a course called “Deconstructing Drake & The Weeknd.”
The course would delve into the lives of artists Drake and the Weeknd.
Aubrey Graham, who likes to go by the Drake and Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, who we know as The Weeknd, are both award-winning musicians that hail from Canada.
Writer, Podcaster and Ryerson Professor-In-Residence, Dalton Higgins, will be teaching the class. According to him, “It’s time to get our Canadian rap and R&B icons recognised and canonised academically or otherwise.”
“It is critical for scholars and historians to examine the Toronto music scene that birthed Drake/Weeknd and helped create the conditions for them to become mega-successful,” he believes.
He has also spoken to certain local publications, telling them that American musicians have courses cantered around their works, the musical lives of Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Beyonce are being taught at Ivy leagues. He strongly believes that these two musicians that hail from Canada deserve no less.
Higgins has written six books on Black music and has rightfully elaborated on the merits of the two artists, explaining why they were not superficial picks. He said, “What people tend to forget about Drake is that he’s actually a great writer. In his rhymes he employs all kinds of literary devices like metaphors, iambic pentameter, similes, so we’re going to deconstruct his lyrics and examine how he puts his songs together.”
He added further, “When you have these two Black Canadian artists from Toronto who are performing rap, R&B and pop and are arguably on their way to becoming billionaires at some point in the future, there is a lot to learn from them.”
The class will be offered as one of the flagship courses for The Creative School’s Professional Music BA program, Canada’s “first transdisciplinary professional music undergraduate program,” as per the university.
The Creative School Dean Charles Falzon added, “Even before registration opens, the enthusiasm for the class is already quite significant so I have a feeling it’ll pack up very quickly.”
Dalton Higgins hopes as his students leave his classroom, they are asking the hard questions about life, race, music and how it all comes together.
The course will be offered in the Winter semester beginning January 2022
