Lack of entertainment and music festival fuels commuter school image
Dale Johnson
Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Opinion
|
Wait, who am I kidding? No band that has played our school in my time at CSULB is a group anybody has ever heard of.
And while we walk to class wondering who this no-name band is that is playing so loud that we need to turn our iPods up to max volume to block out the music, nearly every other major school in Southern California is treated to weekly concerts as well as an annual large scale music festival with-get this-real bands and artists playing them.
Don't get me wrong. I am all for exposure for up-and-coming artists, but that does not mean that smaller bands can't be balanced out by performances featuring music that is known by people other than the band members themselves.
One only has to travel down the 91 freeway to UC Riverside for a successful model of how to pull off a college music festival. On Feb. 23, UCR's second annual Heat Festival is taking place with a lineup full of great music. The concert will include live performances from 311, Mos Def, Circa Survive, Moby, Clipse, Girl Talk and many more across multiple stages.
With the amount of talent that is set to perform at UCR's festival, the $42.50 ticket price seems reasonable. But the real deal maker is that UCR students get in free. The cost is taken out of their student fees.
Schools like UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton have similar festivals with high-profile bands and artists, all at no cost to their students. UCSD's Sun God Festival has seen headliners such as Ludacris, My Chemical Romance, Busta Rymes, Gwen Stefani, Social Distortion and most recently T.I. UCSB's annual concert was headlined last year by Mickey Avalon and T.I.
Not only do we have a larger student body than most of these schools (nearly 20,000 more students than UCSB and 10,000 more than are enrolled at UCSD), the amount we pay in student fees is much higher than what any of these other schools pay, yet we don't see any benefit from our fees. UCSD students pay $21 for the Sun God Festival and other events throughout the year, and we pay $44 a year for our very limited amount of entertainment.
Be the first to comment on this story