I really enjoyed this class! I took this during my first quarter at UCLA and had an awesome experience. Raulerson was an engaging lecturer and he's really passionate about music history. Though the content was highly interesting, you do have to study some history and memorize facts about songs, artists and genres for a midterm and final (flashcards are highly recommended). There is also a term paper, but you choose a music history topic that you wish to look into. Overall, I personally felt that this was a fun class and I loved learning more about the culture behind rock music.

Raulerson was so amazing. I would take a class with him again any day! Material was interesting and there was no homework (he assigns readings, but they aren't necessary). His tests were pretty straightforward, though both the midterm and final had a handful of questions (2-4) that I thought were completely unreasonable and luckily they were just fill in the blank style questions. His tests are mostly simple questions with simple one word to one sentence answers, with 2-3 essays at the end. I got a 97% on the midterm and an 81% on his final. There was also an essay that I got an 88% on, but the topic is super general. Overall, the tests require a good amount of studying, but the lectures are engaging and fun!

He's a fun guy during lecture, makes jokes and all like he's from Iowa or whatever when talking about country music, but those exams are heavily based on memorizing. That's why everyone's so good at it except me. By memorizing, not only naming songs by hearing them but also the definition of skiffle, the name of that one producer that made The Beatles famous or James Brown's debut song. These are, of course, important, but when you have that name at the tip of your tongue and it's worth 3pts each you get distraught. Also don't expect any curve.

In lecture he'll spend 20 minutes in telling a personal anecdote which is often funny, but then rush over the most critical points of the current slide for 30 seconds before moving on to the next topic, so you better be a fast note taker if you want to do well. I don't even recall hearing in lecture some of the things I was asked on the test. He skims over them ever so quickly.

He says that you buy this book called Pop, Rock and Soul and read these pages this week it but you don't have to. It's an aggregate of off-topic articles, mostly about artists he doesn't even go over in lecture and are remotely related to lecture material, so they don't help at all in the exams. So think of it as "optional further reading". Also 20 pages/week is long for me. I'm lazy.

Though both midterms and the final have multiple essay questions that are so open-ended (eg. soul's impact on blues) you can write in any way you like and still get full score on them , it's still based on a lot of memorizing. For instance, it's required that you reference at least 3-4 songs per short essay so that you can get full credit for the points you've made.

Really fun lectures if you're taking it for the hell of it and not towards your degree, though you should be OK with memorizing. Even if you like rock, memorizing rock can make you hate it. I used to listed to Guns N Roses and stuff 6 months ago and now I'm all over house and techno. Just letting you know I could name 75 songs from 1920s to 2000s from listening to their first 10 seconds a couple months ago and tell their significance within the pop music history. Right now, I don't remember sh