NYU Launches Class About Pop Star Lana Del Rey

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Students at New York University interested in music who are looking to avoid any end of summertime sadness can now sign up for a class to study Lana Del Ray at the Lower Manhattan school.

The work of the melancholic singer is set to be studied at the school's Clive Davis Institute starting in October.

The course follows in the footsteps of an incredibly popular class about Taylor Swift's songwriting offered last academic year by NYU. The school later made Swift a doctor in its 2022 graduation ceremony.

The popularity of the Swift course at the West Village school prompted the University of Texas at Austin to offer its own class this academic year on the 11-time Grammy Award winner's songwriting process, first reported by the New York Post.

The two-credit course on Del Rey taught by journalist and author Kathy Iandoli will run from Oct. 20 until Dec. 8.

Here's the course description, according to Variety.

"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. 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 categorized as bubblegum."

The course will specifically look at Del Rey's connection to social justice movements and her relationship to feminism, Variety reported.

Del Rey has been nominated for six Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and won two Brit Awards and two MTV Europe Music Awards.