Hip-hop has been entering the academic setting more and more in the past few years. With an English class at Regents University based on Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city album, Lil’ B giving lectures at ivy league schools and legendary rappers becoming professors, the culture is becoming a classroom novelty that students and colleges are excited about. Producer and engineer Young Guru will be heading a “Hip-Hop Speaker” lecture series at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the U.S.’s top universities.
On Mar. 6th, Guru will present his “Design and Destruction” lecture about how technology and design create and reinvent opportunities in the music industry in efforts to spark engaging dialogue between leaders in hip-hop, students and professors.
Guru, who has produced tracks for Jay Z, Talib Kweli, Fabolous, Mariah Carey, Beyonce and more, is also an artist-in-residence at the University of Southern California’s Thorton School of Music where he encourages for hip-hop “to be studied and revered the same way you would study jazz artists or opera at a class in a university.”