I recently went to the best back-to-school concert I’ve ever been to. It had everything: two acclaimed, diverse acts that together appealed to a wide range of students; an open-air venue with great seats for everybody; and even free commemorative T-shirts! The performers were on time and the sets went off without a hitch. They even stuck around to sign autographs. The show was so anticipated that I found out about it not through a school Web site, but on Brooklyn Vegan, a music blog that breaks new ground for the trendy.
Of course, this concert wasn’t Bruin Bash. As you may have guessed, I wasn’t even in California, much less at UCLA ““ the concert was one of Columbia University’s orientation-week events. The show was open to the New York public ““ which is how I got in ““ but from the look of things, the sizable crowd was almost all students. And they loved it. Who wouldn’t love seeing the Clipse ““ the most exciting act in hip-hop, live or studio ““ bring out their fellow MCs from the Re-Up Gang and run through unreal performances of their hit “Grindin'” and jams from last year’s “Hell Hath No Fury”? Hometown heroes Vampire Weekend (all Columbia alums) also won over the crowd with their caffeinated, buzzed-about indie rock.
It was the kind of show that the Campus Events Commission should be fantasizing about putting on. And I hope they are. Because where Columbia managed to score up-and-coming musicians with both mass appeal and critical approval, last year UCLA seemed to be stuck with bands long past their buzz: Ladytron, Rooney, Minus the Bear, and so on and so forth. And there are more great shows coming up this fall than there are freshmen in an Astro 3 lecture. When Los Angeles is crawling with Natalie Portman-level life-altering concerts, there’s no good reason why more of them can’t happen on campus.
Still, recent pickings have been slim, and nobody’s getting fooled: if anything, in the post-Garden State/OC world we live in, where the hottest new bands appear hourly on the blog aggregator Hype Machine, this year’s incoming freshmen are probably the hippest (or hipster-est) ever.
I don’t know who’s playing this year’s Bruin Bash, and even if I did, the bands will probably change a few times between now and the actual event.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter how many cool bands Campus Events tries to book or even how much getting them costs. What matters is that we get those bands to come and play their hearts out and leave everybody feeling excited about being at UCLA. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Until then, you guys may want to consider booking a flight back east next September.
E-mail Greenwald at dgreenwald@media.ucla.edu.