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Concordia Will Teach a Semester-Long Course Focused on Drake: Media, Myth and Manhood
Concordia University will teach a fall course devoted to Drake, using his albums and OVO brand to explore music, capitalism and artist visibility.
In a move that feels less like celebrity fandom and more like cultural inventory, Concordia University in Montreal will offer a course this fall that uses Drake‘s career as a roadmap for studying contemporary hip-hop, branding and the political economies of visibility.
Professor and artist Yassin Narcy Alsalman unveiled the syllabus on X on June 16, announcing a class billed as an in-depth examination of one of the most commercially dominant — and critically debated — figures in 21st-century music.
“Hip Hop: Past/Present/Future – Drake: Media, Myth and Manhood”
Slides Narcy shared with his announcement lay out a curriculum organized around Drake’s discography and the rise of October’s Very Own. The course supposedly maps each seminar to an album, tracking artistic evolution while interrogating the institutional forces that shape how music is produced, distributed and consumed.
“A central question” the course poses, as Narcy frames it, is “whether audiences want artists to exist purely as entertainment figures, or whether there is a responsibility to consider their well-being and autonomy.”
Alongside the academic scaffolding, Narcy circulated a fan-made video that explains the class will move sequentially through Drake’s catalog, “from So Far Gone to ICEMAN,” using each record as a lens on shifting aesthetics, marketing strategies and the broader cultural moment that greeted each release.
The announcement also gestures toward Narcy’s longer-running relationship with the OVO circle. He has interviewed Noah “40” Shebib on multiple occasions, most recently for the cover of Rolling Stone Middle East North Africa in 2025 — a connection that, at minimum, gives the course access to firsthand testimony about Drake’s studio practice and production ethos.
Context and precedent
This is not Narcy’s first foray into coursework centered on singular, polarizing artists. The professor has previously taught classes on Ye and Kendrick Lamar, suggesting an ongoing project to treat major hip-hop figures as case studies for larger debates about authorship, capitalism and race in popular music.
Whether students sign up as Drake superfans, skeptical observers, or curious cultural analysts, the Concordia class promises to fold pop biography into institutional critique — a reminder that in 2025, the study of pop icons has become a disciplinary move as much as a cultural one.
For now, Concordia’s syllabus arrives as another data point in how universities have begun to formalize the study of contemporary music industries: tracing the arc of a single artist to ask broader questions about brands, labor and the limits of celebrity-driven scholarship.
