Eminem is white, vulgar and talented. Perhaps, scariest of all, he just may be the Elvis of our times. Just as Elvis popularized a largely black style of music, rock 'n' roll, Eminem has outsold his black counterparts with his rhymes. Moreover, he gets national media attention and his own movie.

But Eminem is far from being everyone's spokesperson. It's odd that one of the biggest musical acts during the last four years was just as universally rejected, even by his fans, as being misogynistic and psychopathic. The truth may be that the music world is so much more democratic today, with people's tastes expanding to rap, rock, electronica, country and even classical, that Eminem's acidic rapid-fire lyrics can stand out amid a sea of musical equity.

"Having people being more accepting of difference is good, but it can also lead to difference not really mattering anymore. If nothing shakes you up, challenges you, raises questions, then nothing may seem very consequential either," said Robert Walser, chair of UCLA's musicology department.

In high school, music defined certain cliques and created identity. Culturally, college represents the moment where the tribalism of childhood conformity gives way to exploring the individual self and individual tastes. This is no less apparent in music, where everything from music classes to free concerts to Spring Sing tends to expand the average undergraduate's musical horizons.

Fueling college students' natural tendency for expansion has been MP3 sharing over the Internet, allowing risk-free, no-cost musical experiences. Now Morpheus, KaZaA, and Audio Galaxy have taken over Napster as huge jukeboxes that are creating access to diversity for which students hunger.

"I can listen to different things now without being self-conscious about them, even with very uncool things like opera," said Annie Wong, a fourth-year sociology student. "I read about opera diva Maria Callas one day and decided to download her stuff. Access plays a big part, because on a whim you can hear what something sounds like."

Now, instead of listening to albums, people are making playlists on Winamp and shuffling them up in quasi-DJ fashion. Wong's typical Winamp playlist includes the likes of ATB, Paul Oakenfold, and William Orbit, all electronic trance artists.

"I associate trance with going to raves all the time," Wong said. "It reminds me of being happy. On the other hand, alternative is telling you the world is horrible and depressing, which was cool when I was going through my teenage angst years. In retrospect, I have nothing to be depressed about."

Before the 1960s, college meant graduating to a higher musical taste, whether it was jazz or classical. Now, those hierarchies of taste have collapsed in favor of a new system, which musicologist Leonard Meyer called fluctuating stasis.

"In fluctuating stasis, there is no mainstream style, no progress, just a circulation of different styles, none of which is better or more central," said musicology professor Robert Fink.

This fragmentation makes it easy for various styles to come in and out of popularity very quickly. The Latin music explosion, symbolized by Ricky Martin's shaking bon-bon, and the success of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" roots soundtrack, winner of the Best Album Grammy, both came and went, but did not revolutionize music the way the Beatles or Elvis did. In fact, it may be that the current music world is living under the Elvis/Beatles paradigm, where, like in the film world where every movie after "Star Wars" had to be a blockbuster, *NSYNC does its best to be marketed as a Beatles-esque boy band.

"There's much more sense now that everything from the Beatles on up is part of the present and doesn't signify the past. When I researched heavy metal in the '80s, you'd have the kids listening to White Snake and the parents listening to Led Zeppelin, but it was really the same stuff," Walser said.

Walser believes that this is because parents and kids are living in the same musical paradigm, where Eminem is to today's generation what Elvis was to its parents', providing a similar attraction and hipness quotient. Just as the 1950s and '60s were dominated by rock 'n' roll, the 1990s to the present may be seen years from now as the dominance of hip-hop, in everything from record sales to clothing designs and even rap rock. Record companies exploited the trend by signing "bling bling" artists, and Hollywood also signed on for a new generation of blaxsploitation films ("Shaft," "Undercover Brother," "Friday") featuring soundtracks of chic artists.

With the creation of mass culture through MTV's Total Request Live and narrow, repetitive radio airplay, the Internet has provided a respite from homogeneous styles. In fact, fragmentation, or its sister trend "diversity," has been a way for college students to rebel.

"The belief that record companies should have a power over how music is disseminated and consumed collapsed. There's a gleeful desire to steal as much of their authority as you can. A college student invented Napster and college students brought it into power. It was a revolt of the students against homogenized mass culture," Fink said.

Now the many different subcultures of music can thrive equally without any all-encompassing musical hero. It's possible that no supposedly-inevitable unifying icon will emerge from this fluctuating period of stasis.

"If you get into a targeted group and stay within that, each group could have a transformative star and not have one that transforms all of them at once," said ethnomusicology professor Anthony Seeger.

With new technologies and a new college degree, music can be more about connections than ever. Universalizing rap, which doesn't usually involve traditional singing or acoustic instruments, may be Eminem's way of helping society understand why rap can't simply be segregated away from mainstream culture.

So too, after the UCLA experience is over, hopefully musical exploration will become a life-long journey of self-discovery into that strange place known as the real world, where music of all shapes and sizes continues to impact our generation with its myriad possibilities.