The Course were a dance music act from the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. It consisted of DJ/producer Vincent Hendriks and vocalists Dewi Lopulalan and Irma Derby. They achieved their biggest commercial success in 1997.

Hendriks and Lopulalan first met in 1990 at a DJ "mix championship" in the Netherlands. They met again in 1996, at the same venue, and the two decided to collaborate on some music.

The group released their first single, "Ready or Not", a dance cover of the 1996 song by The Fugees, in early 1997, with echoes of other contemporary hits Ultra Flava by Farley & Heller and Hold That Sucker Down by The OT Quartet. It reached #5 in the UK Singles Chart in April, giving the band their first hit. The follow-up, a cover of Chaka Khan and Rufus' "Ain't Nobody" also fared well, reaching #8 in July. However, their third single, "Best Love", only made it to #51 in December. Subsequent singles failed to see chart action, proving The Course to be a "two-hit wonder". They broke up in the late 1990s because of the lack of commercial success after the first two singles.

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Course of Empire was an Alternative / post-punk band based in Dallas, Texas.

Course of Empire was a hard-edged, post-industrial, alternative music group based in Dallas, Texas from 1988 to 1998. In the early days, large drums would be placed throughout the audience as a means to eliminate the separation between performer and audience. Inspired by the Kodo Drummers of Japan, C.o.E. sought to use the theater of mass drumming to illustrate their vision of a future culture that would evolve as a response to the exponentially increasing human population on the planet. This practice was stopped, however, when the drums ceased to be played by ever-increasing crowds, becoming dangerous missiles instead. The band retained one defining feature however: two drummers playing simultaneously (Michael Jerome and Chad Lovell) creating a propulsive, driving beat that underlaid many of the group's songs.

Song topics were initially of a more political and environmental stance (the name Course of Empire having come from a 5-piece series by 19th Century painter Thomas Cole). Later, the lyrical content would take on topics related to conspiracy theories and the personal quest of spirituality.