Yale to teach course in Beyoncé
NewsCouldn’t make it up?
From Yale Daily News:
Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies and music, will teach a new class titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music.” In the class, students will examine Beyoncé’s artistic work from 2013 to 2024 as a lens to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance.
The course is a byproduct of Brooks’ previous class at Princeton University titled “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.” While at Princeton, Brooks served as a faculty member in the English and African American Studies Departments. Much of the content in her Yale course draws from the section in her Princeton course which focused on Beyoncé’s cultural impact.
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks said. “And there was so much energy around the focus on Beyoncé, even though it was a class that starts in the late 19th century and moves through the present day. I always thought I should come back to focusing on her and centering her work pedagogically at some point.”
Brooks believes that following the 2024 election and the events preceding it, it’s important to recognize Beyoncé’s unprecedented contributions to American culture, popular culture and global culture for the past two decades….
There’s more.
Can’t wait for the Cliff Richard course at Oxford.
This perfectly shows how social justice attempts politicise culture, and in this case even the cheapest entertainment culture. With music it has nothing to do, it is a social/political course, obviously.
Beyoncé isn’t music?
That is not the point – this lady’s entertainment is obviously not treated as music but as an instrument of social justice.
I wonder why not a course in misogyny in hip-hop? (I wonder if I wonder?)
But that is very sensitive, because it’s combining a deplorable mindset with BIPOC culture. The idea is to raise BIPOC, not to diminish it. Cultural critique should be mainly directed to white supremacy as expressed in the hierarchical world of classical music.
I wonder if the artist who made Lemonade and Cowboy Carter, who had a whole Black-Panther themed Superbowl appearance, might be trying to say something about social justice, yeah.
This is like saying “well studying Beethoven’s political imagery in music is not real musicology, it’s politics.”
All of you need to think seriiusly. All artefacts are political. Everything we do comes from our socio-political-economic background. Berio knew this&wrote about it as did Dutch composerAndriessen . There have been and will always be study and popular college courses on how popmusic artefacts influence TGE CONDITIONS OF OUR LIVES. Mr. Lebrecht im very muchbbeginning to see what is worthwhile to U & what isn’t.
It may depend upon how it’s being done. B certainly had political ideas, but in his music he transcended them into something not timely but universal. So, if his politics are used to contribute to an understanding of the music, it’s still the music that is the subject; however if it is done the other way around: the music as demonstrating B’s politics, then it’s not about the music any longer and diverts the attention to the timely, not the transcendental.
By the way, it was a good idea of B to make his music politically ‘neutral’ because it was paid by nobility, and the Eroica was premiered at the palace of one of his patrons, and after the Congress of Vienna (1814, when a suppressive régime was installed) the secret police kept an eye on him, but there never was a concrete reason to make problems for him.
How about pathetic, sexualized sleeze and moronic woketardary?
The irony is that this course might very well visit the topic of ‘WAP’ while viewing WAP online can get someone fired over at Juilliard.
Of all the biasses this course will overlook, it’s Beyoncé’s preference for BBC that intrigues most of her fans.
Two female hip hop artists (neither of whom is Beyonce) rapping about a sex act is in no way equivalent to a university professor viewing that same sex act on his work computer while in his office.
The intersection of Beyoncé, Ben Shapiro, and Cardi B is worthy of discussion on censorship. It should be noted that our beloved Shapiro came to Beyoncé’s defense over her song “Heated.” Read more at Newsweek, 2022.
If you haven’t seen her perform, “Beyoncé Live at the BBC 2006” has many of her early hits.
They kniw this. As is most obvious now certain mindsets will ssy/do anythjng to further their cause.
Daphne Brooks is among the greatest scholars of her generation and this looks to be a fabulous course, delving into many dimensions of American history, culture, and politics. Yale students are lucky she married Prof. Matthew Frye Jacobson and moved to Yale from Princeton several years ago.
Are they really married or is this a joke?
well, so much for woke politics: once again, the (black) women following her (white) husband’s career and relocating to his city and place of employment, and never the other way around
Here, it especially boggles the mind, not only because Princeton is ranked higher than Yale in every meaningful measure, but who the hell would relocate to New Haven voluntarily? If you want to get shot at, there are plenty of cities in NJ near Princeton for that.
You seem to be unfamiliar with how academic employment works. Could be worth checking before spouting off nonsense.
Meaningless pap. Never before thought of Beyoncé’s music as anything more than background accompaniment for shopping malls.Taylor Swift is another. They are not alone. In any case, better rush this through now while they can and before the new WH begins dismantling DEI/DEIB/JEDI edifices all over.
You know you don’t have to take this course, right? If it’s not for you, move along, and leave it to the others.
If Biden got his way, a student taking this course paying for it with federal student loans could stick the taxpayer with the tab.
DEI courses for a DEI professor. There’s your elite educational institution.
In principle DEI ideas are excellent. Every educational institution should be accessible to anyone with the right qualifications. The problem only begins when DEI in itself becomes a qualification. There is much confusion about terms and concepts, and thus, with the strategies aimed at correcting social injustices.
For instance, even in an enlightened country as the Netherlands, students from a working class background find themselves isolated during their study, because of their background. And this in a very socially-minded nation. It is very difficult to change people’s mentality, and political strategies don’t seem to always work well in practice.
Of course they know Emil. Their small minded meanness is the point.
I love shopping with Beyoncé. Somehow I worry less about the amount of sugar and preservatives in my groceries, and buy much more fruit than I otherwise would have done.
Sally
While the Russians are learning math, physics and chemistry, the Americans are immersing themselves in Beyoncé. Guess who wins on the battlefield?
Based on Russia’s performance in the Ukraine, I would not go where you went. 673,000 dead and a need to call in North Korea to cover your tuchus is not a statement of higher learning success in military engagement.
Uh-oh! Spreading misinformation here. The numbers are ~ 75,000 from the Putin side and ~500,000 on Zelensky side. (Source BBC).
I have read VERY different numbers.
US students can take a music/culture elective in addition to math, physics, and chemistry. Hope this helps.
Then why not learning a foreign language instead of Beyoncé-science?
Foreign? Dirty word in the USA, where most people do not have passports.
I get that you’re being intentionally obtuse, but note that nobody is suggesting that the Beyonce-centered music/culture course is a science course, and the instructor is not in a science department. Again, students take some number of electives in their college curriculum, including a foreign language. One can think critically about a variety of topics, including the cultural role a superstar artist plays.
As an engineering major, I took an honors elective called American Cinema, American Society and applied the depths of critical thought to that course as I did to any other.
Aren’t there better kinds of material to train critical thinking? There is an enormous subject, a very wide field, of true critical thinking, called ‘philosophy’, with an impressive history of some 2000 years. This offers ample material to really train any kind of critical thinking, and avoiding it and landing American cinema on a students’ plate is ridiculous. It merely reveals that the people devisising such courses lack the very thing they would like to teach their students.
ARE Russians learning math, physics, and chemistry?
Most fighting-age men have fled, those who couldn’t are dying in Ukraine, the younger generation is being indoctrinated in Orthodox religion…
Definitely not the Russians – they can’t even handle Ukraine
Because clearly this is the one and only academic course being offered at Yale University. All math, science and chemistry courses have been cancelled to make room for it…
I see. It’s much worse than I had imagined.
Playing the stuff of these ladies very loudly would demoralize any Russian soldier, or else be a strong motivation to join the enemy.
Forward! Twerking all the way to Moscow.
🙂
We’ll have to get back to you!!!!!!!!
In today’s primitive and atavistic society, it cannot be denied that despite prodigious effort over the centuries and a plethora of civilizing influences, we are fast losing our precious love of the arts, much to the corruptive preference of jungle drums and whatever else is guaranteed to bring out the savage in all of us; to manifest all the negative aspects of our fallen nature, bequeathed to us by our First Parents, Adam and Eve, thereby carrying on as though we lived in a tree!
guest1848
Jungle drums! I am a Baby Boomer; my parents belonged to The Greatest Generation. When I was a teenager, my mother referred to rock ‘n roll as Jungle Music, whereas I thought the label more nearly applied to Big Band drummer Gene Krupa and his ilk. Beyoncé? Not even close.
As far as I know, these two people were characters in a religious myth and had nothing to do with our real ancestors. Humanity does not need such myths to fall back to earlier stages of evolution.
People regress when life requires some effort. The infantilisation of modern Western life does the rest.
Didn’t Professor Higgins sing something like ‘as if her home were in a tree’?? Alan Lerner was onto something.
I cannot tell if the people who upvoted me thought that I was being unironic
Yes, Professor Brooks, please explain why Beyoncé failed to influence Black women to vote for Harris who got less Black women votes than Biden did, or to influence the Black man vote, or Latino or even Puerto Rican vote, or that of Indian-Americans or Arab-Americans, before you even need to explain Beyoncé’s irrelevance for the White women vote, much less the White men vote.
Preach, sistah!
And people wonder why Trump won
Yes, we all know Trump carried Wisconsin and Arizona because of one course in a wide course catalogue for a dozen students at an elite prestige university in Connecticut.
Kinda
I really can’t see the problem with this.
A large proportion of a university’s aim is to teach critical thinking. Research. analysis, and evaluation are the core skills, and the subject matter serves merely as a means to teaching these.
A small minority may rail against the teaching of Cultural Studies, but as a former Programme Mananger at the US-UK Fulbright Commission, I welcome any addition to a curriculum that increases student engagement.
The question is, how much would a social justice course on pop music contribute to young people’s critical thinking? if such extremely primitive material is deemed necessary, how would that help?
Imagine a course in high cuisine cooking taking as practicing material the worst BigMac.
Actually I think the BigMac is a perfect metaphor for much popular culture and lefty ideology; high on calories and very low on taste and nutrition.
To dismiss ‘pop music’ as ‘extremely primitive’ is merely a display of ignorance and prejudice, I’m sorry to say. Reminiscent of the way uninformed people used to dismiss jazz as ‘jungle music’.
Please, don’t be sorry to say…these comments are ignorant and prejudiced.
There are people around who think jazz is concert music. They have no idea that they misjudge both, but who cares?
I agree. It’s great, and relaxing, and uplifting.
Sally
The pop music of the mentioned ladies can easily be labelled as extremely primitive. There is also better pop, but the entire genre is meant for entertainment, not art music experience, not for the concert hall, not for very attentive listening. There is nothing against it, but the efforts to put it on pedestalls where it does not belong, is damaging to both the intention of entertainment and that of concert music. These distinctions are very important to be able to understand the meaning of the one and of the other.
To call these kind of normal distinctions uninformed is besides the point….
There is room for examination of popular music in an academic context, and perhaps Professor Brooks will approach her subject with due seriousness. But it does seem rather trivial. Michael Jackson, Prince and Whitney Houston, three dead-too-young artists from the black community, all of whom achieved massive popular success comparable to that of Beyonce, have not left much behind.
All I know of Beyonce is that she has stayed married for more than 15 years, no mean feat in show business. She may indeed be the best of her lot, but whether there is “intellectual thought” to be gleaned from her work remains to be proven. And how much “Black history” can a pop singer of 43 have contributed?
The Beatles had much more societal significance than many pop stars before or since. Yet in the 80s, I heard a young person in a record store ask a companion “Did you know Pal McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Sic transit gloria mundi.
My university studies were on material that had stood the test of time. It had “charted” century upon century.
Yale used to set standards, But so did Oxbridge, and in a recent Spectator article Philip Womack says he cannot get his Russell Group students through Harry Potter.
We are about to enter a very scary new world, in which the incoming leader of the free world looks like having a completely untrammeled hand to run a kleptocracy — or a dangerously vain and uninformed tyranny that will sack enemies within and without, unchecked by Congress or a sober and professional cabinet. And out in the country, rather than learning about history, philosophy, science and law, students are studying Beyonce and resisting having to read “all of” Harry Potter or any of Moby Dick. Heaven help us all.
The current “leader of the free world” is himself the titular head of a kleptocracy. His brother, son, daughter and niece all enriched themselves with overseas money by using the Biden name. Twenty million dollars made their way to the Bidens via twenty-one shell corporations.
Perhaps if you audited Professor Brooks’ course at Yale you would get some answers to the questions in your second paragraph. Meantime, see if you can find a copy of her book, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke UP, 2006) for preliminary course reading.
Or you could just look at the Wikipedia page on Beyoncé to get an idea of her cultural significance.
Very funny… ‘Beyoncé’s cultural significance’. To really analyse that theme would be devastatingly damaging for Mrs Beyoncé.
Actually, it wouldn’t–she would fare extremely well, and will survive your efforts at pettiness quite nicely (calling her a “lady” and “Mrs Beyoncé,” grow up).
You don’t actually know her music at all, do you?
I know it’s all terribly difficult….. but you should not value yourself so humbly. You seem to be impressed by the world view of cultural relativity, and really, that is entirely misleading. There is so much more around. It is always possible for everybody to get out of the corner and develop a bit, which will lead to a much more fulfilling life…. really.
Yes, indeed, Mr Borstlap, perhaps you should try it. It is not as difficult as you seem to think.
I for my part find it very difficult. I’m being corrected all the time without any chance on relief. Even the guests here arrive in good spirits and leave the building with their heads down and depressed, in spite of the drinks they got.
Sally
I could see a course in Beyonce and Taylor Swift, or pop music in general, as part of the business school curriculum. Both have become fabulously wealthy, so why not explore what made them successful?
Would that need a university course at Yale? Anybody can see, or rather hear, why these people got so wealthy.
Universities are supposed to be places of higher learning. That means that not all material can be considered as good as any other.
And it appears that the only things worth learning are the things that you believe you know. I find that you are limited.
And thinking that pop music can contribute to students’ critical thinking is not?
I know, it’s all very difficult, but keep trying!
When do they cover her relationship with Diddy? I’m sure that will be fascinating!
Are you choosing Mr. Combs to slag off Beyonce because of his current legal situation? She has as far as I know led a pretty quiet and decent private life.
Yale leaked the 1st exam to me:
1. Beyoncé’s first solo album, which helped her transition from Destiny’s Child to a solo artist, was released in what year?
A) 2000
B) 2001
C) 2003
D) 2005
2. Which song did Beyoncé famously lip-sync at the 2013 Presidential Inauguration?
A) “Halo”
B) “Run the World (Girls)”
C) “At Last”
D) “The Star-Spangled Banner”
3. Beyoncé was involved in a controversial Photoshop incident in 2015. What did she allegedly photoshop in her Instagram photo?
A) Her facial features
B) Her waist
C) Her thick thighs
D) Her hair color
4. Which of the following is a notable 2020 release by Beyoncé, blending elements of Afrobeat and Western pop music?
A) Lemonade
B) Homecoming
C) Black Is King
D) Renaissance
5. In 2024, Beyoncé campaigned for which presidential candidate, who ultimately lost to President Donald Trump in a re-election bid?
A) Joe Biden
B ) Kamala Harris
C) Bernie Sanders
D) Hillary Clinton
6. Beyoncé was part of a legendary group before going solo. What was the name of the group?
A) TLC
B ) En Vogue
C) Destiny’s Child
D) 3LW
7. Beyoncé’s alter ego, famously used to express a more confident and bold side of her personality, is named:
A) Sasha Fierce
B ) Queen Bey
C) Honey B
D) Sasha Fierce-Beyoncé
8. Which of Beyoncé’s music videos broke the internet when it was released in 2016 and was inspired by feminist themes and messages of empowerment?
A) “Formation”
B )”Irreplaceable”
C) “Crazy in Love”
D) “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”
9. What major event was Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album largely inspired by?
A) Her pregnancy with Blue Ivy
B ) The racial injustice protests
C) Alleged infidelity in her marriage to Jay-Z
D) Her friendship with Michelle Obama
10. Beyoncé’s 2023 album “Renaissance” explores themes of:
A) Space exploration and futuristic love
B )Black joy and queer culture
C) The struggles of motherhood
D) Personal growth and reconciliation
They will first have an introduction course with simple questions, to filter-out the real dummies:
Who was Beyoncé?
A) Yes
B) No
C) No opinion
Why are you here?
A) Maybe
B) It’s my mother
C) Of course
Bravo, clearly you earned your Ph.D in Beyoncérology, now you are qualified to apply for a professorship at Yale or as Beyoncé’s personal assistant.
A lot of snobbery here.
I’m currently perfecting my technique in preparing beans on toast at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
We cannot, we must not, we will not
A class on pop music history at… a music school?
Yes. There’s a lot to that stuff that people who don’t listen to it (me and most of the commenters in this thread) aren’t aware of.
It’s obviously an elective, not a required course, and probably not even offered regularly.
So stop clutching your pearls, you’re getting your creamed corn all over them.
This cavalier comment shows the problem. Pop music, of any kind, and mostly the worst, is everywhere: in shopping malls, in cafés, restaurants, hotel lobbies, elevators, swimming pools, dentist waiting rooms, hospitals, gyms, garages, factories, offices, etc. etc. In many big cities it is hardly possible to find a café where you can actually TALK with your friends, because of the primitive banging sound blanket spreading like aural dung over the guests. And then, there are ‘classical music lovers’ seeing no problem in the field opening the doors to exactly the thing that numbs any musical development in the average civilian, which could – if protected from the nonsense – produce some audience growth for classical music. Worse: these silly ‘musicians’ have political influence by advising their fans to vote for this or that politician, as if they were somehow knowledgeable. The carelessness around the subject – the trend of poppisation of populations – merely shows the damage already done.
Funny, in elevators it seems mostly to be Vivaldi!
People do actually listen to ‘pop’ music in all its variety (as opposed to simply hearing it in the background). Give it a try, get some recommendations, you might be surprised.
Will they be studying Beyonce’s autographed manuscript scores and compiling a New Critical Edition?
You think Beyoncé is unworthy of a college semester of attention?
Come back when you’ve eradicated 12-tone serialism from the curriculum… surely the most worthless dry well ever to metastasize across academia… and then I might take your disapproval as something other than pretentious nonsense.
Pop music and serialism find themselves in the same category. They are united in their rejection of art music.
A good Gershwin or good Lennon/McCartney song has as much art and craft as a good Schubert song.
No serial song can make such a claim.
Confusing concert music & pop music reveals a lack of understanding culture in general. We listen with different ears to Schubert or Lennon, however they may sound alike for inexperienced ears.
Daphne Brookes is an incredible scholar with a deep understanding of music. An invaluable colleague on my work resuscitating forgotten American music from the mid 1900s. This topic is just a jumping off point for a deep cultural dive
After the election, no one goes to class.
Hopefully the good professor will further illuminate our best students with courses on Cardi B and Meghan the Stallion…….
That’s Megan THEE Stallion for reasons that have long eluded (though not interested) me.
Personally, I think a university creating a course on P Diddy, about his music, politics and sexual lifestyle, would be more valuable. The subject of Diddy and ideology could be explored.
The question of why people with certain political attitudes deal with the rapper by having two opposing opinions all at the same time needs to be examined. Or a hipper, funkier version of a course that focuses on the Met’s former James Levine.
A class on why colleges charge students X or Y number of dollars per credit would also be interesting. The subject of where that money goes to and whether it provides a good enough income to members of academia should be explored.
I don’t quite get the complaint here. First of all, Cliff Richard ain’t Beyonce. You may not think much of her, but she has an enormous presence in popular music and global culture. Second of all, the professor teaches in African Studies. It’s not being taught in the Yale School of Music, god forbid! So, you many not like Beyonce, but that’s no reason to trash the course or the professor. A lot of stuff gets taught around music in the humanities.
Support the correct candidate and they might teach about you, too.