AF AMER M12A
African American Musical Heritage
Description: (Formerly numbered M110A.) (Same as Ethnomusicology M12A.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Sociocultural history and survey of African American music covering Africa and its impact on Americas; music of 17th through 19th centuries; minstrelsy and its impact on representation of blacks in film, television, and theater; religious music, including hymns, spirituals, and gospel; black music of Caribbean and Central and South America; and music of black Los Angeles. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 5.0
Units: 5.0
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - Stop. Do not take this class. This course is a perfect horror story plagued by an overconfident, underqualified, vengeful, tenured professor who knows no god or authority. The content is interesting if you’re into that kind of stuff, but that’s all in terms of pros. Cheryl Keyes is WILDLY incompetent—immensely unqualified and unprofessional. Lectures are a lackadaisical series of useless, banal tangents. She follows no course structure and doesn’t employ lecture slides, so she simply forgets to cover content featured on the exams. She‘ll tell you that names are not too important, but HEED ME NOW; the midterm and final (together worth ~55% of your final grade) are comprised of perhaps 80% names. If it’s raining, there’s a heavy chance she‘ll not attend her own lecture (with no communication to students); I suspect she is water soluble, much like the wicked witch of the west. Don’t concern yourself with punctuality—she was far more often than not late to lecture and often didn’t get “rolling” (get it) until 15-20 minutes after the scheduled start time. The syllabus is for shits and giggles—she changed the date of the final, the final essay, the weighting of the grade subsections, and the required readings with little notice and incomplete communication. On the topic of communication, she does not respond to emails and is iffy about raised hands in lecture; if you want information out of her it is easier to accost her and shake it out of her one on one. So. The first midterm was tricky, the TAs grade it, and the average is around 75%. She is not satisfied with this, so she revoked the grades and scored them herself; the average dropped to a 69% or so. For the whole quarter she said “the final should be open notes”. Now, clever as I am, I didn’t believe a word of it. Some of my less fortunate classmates were rather caught off guard when this statement was revoked in week 10. Her justification? She suspected widespread cheating on the midterm. The very same midterm that had a D average. So, either WITH CHEATING, the best people could do was a D, she was being paranoid, or she was fibbing in our faces. Classic lose-lose-lose situation. Anywho, she popped into discussion on professor evaluation day (YIPE!) and when folks raised concerns over the final being closed-notes, she whipped out a GNARSTY attitude. Formerly, I had painted her as well-intentioned—just aggressively inept. However, she established herself as a board-certified opp in that discussion. It became evident that she wishes people to do poorly in her class because she did poorly in her undergrad. However, because—somehow—UCLA became her stomping grounds, the only way she can achieve this sick dynamic with such a qualified student population is by creating unfair exams and an uninviting learning environment. She shot down any shot at my future appreciation of this subject. I feel like I haven’t established sufficiently just how unreasonable her exams were. I was taking organic chemistry and physics in concurrence with this course and this class blew them both all the way out of the water in terms of difficulty. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful TA team, and they were the only forces working to keep this course on track and achievable—shoutout Sarah Robinson and Zoe Coker, may your brie be room-temperature and your kefir be chilled.
Fall 2025 - Stop. Do not take this class. This course is a perfect horror story plagued by an overconfident, underqualified, vengeful, tenured professor who knows no god or authority. The content is interesting if you’re into that kind of stuff, but that’s all in terms of pros. Cheryl Keyes is WILDLY incompetent—immensely unqualified and unprofessional. Lectures are a lackadaisical series of useless, banal tangents. She follows no course structure and doesn’t employ lecture slides, so she simply forgets to cover content featured on the exams. She‘ll tell you that names are not too important, but HEED ME NOW; the midterm and final (together worth ~55% of your final grade) are comprised of perhaps 80% names. If it’s raining, there’s a heavy chance she‘ll not attend her own lecture (with no communication to students); I suspect she is water soluble, much like the wicked witch of the west. Don’t concern yourself with punctuality—she was far more often than not late to lecture and often didn’t get “rolling” (get it) until 15-20 minutes after the scheduled start time. The syllabus is for shits and giggles—she changed the date of the final, the final essay, the weighting of the grade subsections, and the required readings with little notice and incomplete communication. On the topic of communication, she does not respond to emails and is iffy about raised hands in lecture; if you want information out of her it is easier to accost her and shake it out of her one on one. So. The first midterm was tricky, the TAs grade it, and the average is around 75%. She is not satisfied with this, so she revoked the grades and scored them herself; the average dropped to a 69% or so. For the whole quarter she said “the final should be open notes”. Now, clever as I am, I didn’t believe a word of it. Some of my less fortunate classmates were rather caught off guard when this statement was revoked in week 10. Her justification? She suspected widespread cheating on the midterm. The very same midterm that had a D average. So, either WITH CHEATING, the best people could do was a D, she was being paranoid, or she was fibbing in our faces. Classic lose-lose-lose situation. Anywho, she popped into discussion on professor evaluation day (YIPE!) and when folks raised concerns over the final being closed-notes, she whipped out a GNARSTY attitude. Formerly, I had painted her as well-intentioned—just aggressively inept. However, she established herself as a board-certified opp in that discussion. It became evident that she wishes people to do poorly in her class because she did poorly in her undergrad. However, because—somehow—UCLA became her stomping grounds, the only way she can achieve this sick dynamic with such a qualified student population is by creating unfair exams and an uninviting learning environment. She shot down any shot at my future appreciation of this subject. I feel like I haven’t established sufficiently just how unreasonable her exams were. I was taking organic chemistry and physics in concurrence with this course and this class blew them both all the way out of the water in terms of difficulty. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful TA team, and they were the only forces working to keep this course on track and achievable—shoutout Sarah Robinson and Zoe Coker, may your brie be room-temperature and your kefir be chilled.
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