Fans of Drake may soon be able to use their knowledge of ‘Champagne Papi’ to help them earn a university credit. Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont. has a course called ‘Hip Hop Publics’ as part of their 2024/2025 course offerings. The course description says it will focus on Drake to explore hip hop in Canada, its underground and commercial successes, and the intersection of hip hop and public discourse in Canada. “In this course, we will be treating Drake as an exemplar to understand firstly, what it means to occupy the subject position of a commercially successful Canadian (Black, male, middle-class etc.) rapper, and secondly to understand what a successful Canadian rapper can tell us about Canada. To explore the latter, we will analyze Drake, his celebrity, his body of work, and the discourses produced about his person and work,” the course write-up reads. The university also said the course will look at hip hop culture from a Canadian standpoint and delve into what it can tell us about the country’s relationship to popular culture in the United States. It will also consider Caribbean popular culture and how Canada is ideologically understood as a multicultural nation.
