Cultural History of Rap...
Sounds like fun right?
It really wasn't

The class is tested on obscure facts. What was the first radio station to play XYZ? What was the FM frequency of that radio station???

Overall, I was able to pass because of my awesome TA Mr. Harris, peppy African American dude. He was able to outline the main points of lecture for us because frankly it's damn near impossible to follow her in class. and the essay can really help so don't neglect it!

but hey, maybe if you read the book you'll do better...

If organization is something that's important to you, I wouldn't recommend taking any class by Professor Keyes. For whatever reason, she is opposed to using Powerpoint and lectures by scrolling down through a Microsoft Word document, which is extremely disorderly and unhelpful. She often forgot the names of rappers she was trying to teach about or songs she was intending to reference, but would ask questions about them on the midterm and final anyway. You'll spend a large portion of classes watching various multimedia, the majority of which are recorded on VHS from VH1 programs in the 90's and are in mediocre viewing condition. You'll want to pay attention to those, as the tests ask oddly specific questions about various people and topics from them. Our lecture had a particularly low average on both the midterm and final (I think in the high 60s, which I find low for a multiple choice exam) and the question of curving them was completely dismissed by her, so most people didn't get the grade they expected to.

On the other hand, she has an extensive knowledge of rap as an artform, and has interviewed many major artists first hand, which gives credibility to her cause. She wrote her own textbook, which is surprisingly insightful to the world of rap, but she doesn't teach nearly as well as she writes.

Prof. Keyes was a horrible lecturer. I took her for the cultural history of rap, which is definitely an interesting topic but not with her. As everyone else has said she quoted other authors and her upcoming book most of the time and her lectures were very disorganized. Then she quizzed us (mutilple choice) on very obscure facts. Her questions would ask for all four of something that she said in lecture one time, and she speaks so fast that you cannot write it all down. Her tests are not conceptually based. Her reader was also very disorganized. She basically puts all of the readings for all of her classes in the reader with no table of contents and does not tell you that the reader is organized by alphabetical order. I would definitely not recommend taking her; my understanding of rap is no better than when I started the class. She also does not grade on a curve and everyone always does poorly on her midterm. Our class did so poorly that she had to offer 20 points extra credit to make up for it.