Professor Leaf is really awesome! It's clear that he cares a lot about his students and the class content. You are expected to watch several music documentaries each week which can kind of become a drag, but the accompanying written assignments are super easy as long as you paid attention to the films. Grading in this class is lenient, so as long as you answer the homework questions thoroughly, you should do very well. There are no tests in this class, just a major report and a final project. Overall, I would highly recommend taking this class. Just be sure to spread watching the documentaries out each week (unless binge-watching is your thing). Is the workload somewhat tedious? Yes. But is it easy and interesting? Also yes.

I was looking forward to taking this class, but as the quarter moved forward, I began to dread it. The subject material had a heavy focus on white men in the music industry; there was only one week that focused on an artist of color, and when we were assigned documentaries featuring female artists, they were never the sole focus of the week. The amount of work that was assigned to us also felt like it disrespected our time. One class had 9 hours of documentaries to watch as the prep work before watching the accompanying lectures. And this was after the professor said he had lessened the workload. I'm a full time student, and I took this class as a lower division GE but ended up having to spend more time doing work for this class than my two upper divs for my major. Also, for a class that relies so heavily on watching films, I was incredibly frustrated that none of the documentaries hosted on CCLE had subtitles or captions. This made doing the required watching for class difficult because at times it was difficult to follow the docs. I switched into this class so I wouldn't have to do a 10-page research paper in a different GE, I wish I'd just done that instead. Knowing what I know about this class now, I would not have taken it. My TA was amazing though, she made an incredibly frustrating class better, and I really appreciate the work she put in.

prof leaf is awesome and super knowledgable I loved all the topics we covered BUT you will be expected to watch at least 6 hours of film and interviews every week which is kind of a lot. you write a short essay every week on everything you've watched and there are some final projects. it was all kind of unorganized at first but it was overall a good class if you like the topic.