Temple University launches Kendrick Lamar course on culture, legacy, and lyrics

The course, titled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D. city,” will be offered during the Fall 2025 semester. 

The list of courses centering hip-hop and hip-hop artists at various universities around the United States has a new addition to the list. This upcoming semester at Temple University in Philadelphia, a course that endeavors to cover the life, legacy and cultural influence of Kendrick Lamar will be available to students, according to Philly’s WHYY. 

Titled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of the M.A.A.D. City,” the course will be taught by Timothy Welbeck, an assistant professor in the university’s Africology and African American Studies department. According to his university bio, Welbeck—who is a lawyer whose scholarly work sits at the intersection of race, law, and culture—has taught other courses centering hip-hop including, “Hip-Hop and Black Culture,” and “No City for Young Men: Hip-Hop and the Narrative of Marginalization,” which is also the title for his upcoming book which will explore “how hip-hop communicates the lived experience of persons who live in urban centers across the nation, particularly Black men living in major cities.”

In Welbeck’s course about Kendrick Lamar, students will dissect and analyze Lamar’s work through an Afrocentric lens and while looking at the policies that shaped his upbringing as well as the environment in Compton, California, that have shaped his music and perspective. The course will also delve into how Lamar sits in the West Coast canon and the musical heritage from which Lamar comes in that space. 

Temple University’s course won’t be the first university course to dig into the legacy of Lamar. As far back as 2014, Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Ga., offered a literary composition course titled, “Good Kids, Mad Cities,” that used Lamar’s debut album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” as a starting point. Other courses centering on Lamar’s work have also been offered at Lehigh University and Concordia University, among others. 

In addition to the academic courses that examine the influence of Lamar in a scholarly context, two prominent books have been written by hip-hop and music scholars about the cultural imprint and legacy of the Compton MC, who is currently on tour for his “Grand National Tour” with artist SZA. In 2020, Marcus J. Moore released “The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America”—the title a nod to Lamar’s ambitious sophomore album, “To Pimp a Butterfly.” And in 2021, Miles Marshall Lewis released “Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar”—whose title was a nod to one of the standout records “Sing About Me/Dying of Thirst” on Lamar’s debut album, the aforementioned “good kid, m.A.A.d. city.” 

Kendrick Lamar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 2018 album, “DAMN” has had quite the past year and a half. After embroiling himself in one of hip-hop’s most significant beefs, he went on to create the indisputable song of 2024, multiple Grammy Award-winning “Not Like Us,” release his critically acclaimed, Los Angeles-centric sixth studio album, “GNX,” and headline the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Other hip-hop and Black cultural artists who have had courses offered about their lives and musical legacies include Jay-Z, Tupac, Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, and others, along with several universities that offer courses in Hip-Hop studies.