Courses, such as "History of Rock and Roll" or "History of Jazz," sound like pushover classes, where listening to the Beatles is considered homework. Yet UCLA musicologist Susan McClary and company are beginning to infuse those popular classes with the kind of seriousness often associated with classical music.

Her latest paper, titled "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late 20th-Century Culture," argues for serious academics to include rap and other "simple," repetitive music in discussion.

"Even if I thought rap was completely devoid of musical interest, which I don't, it still has been probably the most powerful single force in popular music in the last 15 years. That means we have to take it seriously," McClary said.

McClary lectured Monday on her paper to a small group of students and professors as a joint venture between UCLA's musicology and sociology departments. On a small boombox, she played musical excerpts from pieces she used as examples in her paper. These included the works of Prodigy, Tupac Shakur, PJ Harvey, Philip Glass, Bo Diddley, and Led Zeppelin.

The common feature of this music is repetition, which often gets a bad rap for being muscially simple. Many theorists have explained musical repetition as a dulling of the mind, as a cause of immorality, and as a lower class aesthetic. McClary, however, makes the case that repetition allows for certain musical effects that are rather profound, a tradition that extends from Monteverdi's 17th Century works to rapper Tupac Shakur's songs.

"In Tupac's case, repetition is an indictment of gangster life that he finds himself trapped in, but the music won't really allow for any escape. If you had really complex harmonies, you wouldn't get that effect," McClary said.

Repetition as an effect has also been associated with rhythm and dancing. The connection of repetition, rhythm, and body movement create interesting combinations of how people find identity through music.

"Rhythm structures the way we experience ourselves in time. It can try to eradicate our consciousness of the body in trance with very few pulses that make us move. Music that has a repetitive groove is going to affect the body," McClary said.

While this view may seem like common sense to people who go clubbing regularly, rhythm in music has long been taboo. Early country music refused any accompanied drumming as a rule. Classical music alienated people through intentional obfuscation of rhythm and an overt focus on harmonic complexity.

While harmonic theories are quite advanced, rhythm has been often ignored by academia.

Yet McClary argues that rhythm is very fundamental to the way music affects people. While enjoying complex harmonies requires some training, being able to enjoy an equally complex groove does not.

"It's always very slight nuances on either side of the beat that kick the body into motion. You're not even aware consciously of what was being done, yet everyone in the room knows how to move," McClary said.

Since the early '90s and groups like NWA and 2 Live Crew, a rap group censored for its obscenity, rap has been seen as a negative influence. But McClary believes that they don't represent most rap.

"All 19th century opera required that a woman be killed on a stage at the end. That is much more troublesome than what is done in a lot of hip hop, which is concerned with community improvement, eradicating drugs, and critiquing gangster culture," McClary said.

"To say that all classical music is great and all pop music is morally degraded is just unacceptable."