You'll soon be able to study Lana Del Rey at university

If there’s a huge Lana Del Rey fan in your life, tell them to enrol at New York University (NYU) as soon as they can.

As per Variety, the university is launching a new course devoted to the artist next month. Titled ‘Topics in Recorded Music: Lana Del Rey’, it’s set to be held from October 20th to December 8th, and is being taught by journalist and author Kathy Iandoli.

“Over the course of eight critically-acclaimed albums, the six-time Grammy nominated artist has introduced a sad core, melancholic, and baroque version of dream pop that in turn helped shift and reinvent the sound (and mood) of mainstream music beyond the 2010s,” the course description reads.

“Through her arresting visuals and her thematic attention to mental health and tales of toxic, damaged love, Del Rey provided a new platform for artists of all genders to create ‘anti-pop’ works of substance that could live in a mainstream once categorised as bubblegum.”

You never thought you’d read the phrase “sad core” in a university course description, did you? Mainstream music and academia, however, have been intertwining more and more recently. NYU’s Clive Davis Institute started a class on Taylor Swift earlier this year, taught by Rolling Stone journalist Brittany Spanos.

Montreal’s Concordia University announced it was offering Canada’s first university course devoted to Kanye West. Taught by professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman (also an MC), “Kanye vs. Ye: Genius by Design”, the course was about to discuss “Ye’s art, design, music, celebrity and cultural impacts in the age of information.”

Harry Styles also recently got his own devoted university course: titled “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture”, the course is scheduled to be held at Texas State University next year.

For more on this topic, follow the Pop Observer.