On Saturday, April 26, the alternative rock band Third Eye Blind will be gracing Amherst with its presence for our annual Spring Weekend concert. In theory, this should be a focal point of the semester, as we usher in spring with a raucous weekend of celebration and music. Yet the excitement surrounding the event is minimal and its significance seems diminished—with good reason.
I listened to Third Eye Blind around the same time everyone else did (in middle school), when the songs seemed mature and grown-up, dealing with serious topics that were far enough outside our realm of experience to be intriguing. That was nearly a decade ago, and none of us are in middle school anymore. But while we’ve grown up, Third Eye Blind apparently has not; the band hasn’t released anything notable in years, and is currently touring an expansive slate of colleges on the strength of its first album and the memories it provokes. While Mount Holyoke was treated to a concert by über-hip rapper MIA and Smith will welcome the soulful Canadian songstress Feist for its Spring Weekend, we are left with a one-album wonder whose fame has long expired. Come April 26, we will be reminiscing about the past when we should be excited about the show and celebrating the few warm days we have at Amherst.
The situation could have been very different: We were offered a long list of possible bands to play our Spring Concert, including the aforementioned MIA and Wilco, one of my favorite bands and a heavily praised live act. So it was with puzzlement that I wondered exactly how Third Eye Blind had garnered enough votes to headline our concert. After copious research (scanning the voting results once or twice) and some difficult fourth grade division, I reached a profound conclusion: Not enough students were voting. Sure, it might seem obvious, but less than half the student body was participating in the surveys that narrowed down the list of artists—no more than 765 students voted in any single one.
My initial reaction was that people must be unaware of the surveys, leaving me concerned that there might be devout Hootie & the Blowfish fans out there whose voices were being unintentionally silenced. Our method of choosing an artist is quite honestly laughable. We simply receive an email from the all-powerful AAS and are expected to open it immediately to examine its contents, like children gleefully ripping through layers of wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Only, instead of getting that Lego airport I’d always wanted, I found an unceremonious link to a homely webpage with a smattering of categories available for me to vote on. After wading through questions about participation in academic internships and who our next student body president should be, my eyes finally caught a glimmer of a survey about our Spring Concert.
These emails kept arriving throughout first semester, until we eventually whittled our choices down to the final selection, Third Eye Blind. But shouldn’t there be a little more in the way of notification and advertisement for something as momentous as our Spring Concert? The Amherst College Program Board (ACPB) organizes the concert but unfortunately fails to advertise for it or even encourage us to vote at all. There’s barely any discussion about the possible candidates: We don’t bother toiling over the merits of one artist versus another or even whether we should spend tens of thousands of dollars for a concert in the first place. I only recall seeing one Facebook group early in the year devoted to bringing Lil’ Wayne to Amherst, and apparently it wasn’t much of a success—he finished in the bottom half of vote-getters in only the Hip-Hop/R&B category. And while there was discussion about potential artists on the Daily Jolt, I don’t think public debate should be limited to a third-party website. Maybe this was naïveté on my part, but I was expecting posters up all over campus imploring us to vote for particular artists, or at least debates in Valentine over whether Modest Mouse or The Strokes would put on a better show. Instead, there was nary a whisper about the subject on campus.
This brings me to the main problem with the Spring Concert: People don’t really care about it. This concert is simply not considered a significant or crucial event on campus, and the final outcome of the surveys doesn’t weigh heavily on the minds of most students, even though we might have had a role in determining that outcome. The students who want to vote do so, and those who don’t care choose not to vote. It appears to me that the overwhelming sentiment is one of ambivalence towards the concert itself, not just towards the potential artists. The concert really lacks significance in many ways, and I think we should do our best to reform it.
Starting at the most basic level, we should not be bouncing around artists’ names and dollar amounts in campus-wide emails. Instead of allowing ACPB to continue offering altogether uninspiring choices, we ought to form a committee devoted entirely to the Spring Concert. Not only would this attract serious music fans, but also it would be a highly influential and desirable position. The committee would have the power to allocate funds and possibly choose a few smaller acts instead of one big artist. Other schools take this path, most notably Brown, which is known for its perennially stellar Spring Weekend Concert. This year, Brown’s two-day affair sports a diverse lineup with MIA, rapper Lupe Fiasco, jam band Umphrey’s McGee, DJ Girl Talk and indie rock darlings Vampire Weekend. These bands are the product of meticulous preparation by Brown Concert Agency to make sure that everyone can enjoy its Spring Weekend.
I attended Brown’s concert a few years ago and found that it is more than simply a break for the students during the last few weeks of school; it is a celebration of college itself, along with the joys of having a sensational and memorable event in the midst of the frenzy over final papers and theses. Our Spring Concert should be no different. Ideally it will be a glorification of the moment, not an opportunity to wax nostalgic about our middle school years. We have the ability to put on a Spring Concert that stirs up excitement and brings together the student body, and planning for next year should start now.