Shortly after I got here, Union launched a student-life initiative aimed at changing the campus dynamics, called the “Minerva Program.” This assigns students, faculty, and staff to a set of seven “Houses” (mostly named after big donors), with significant budgets given to each house to put on programming. Each house also has a House Council to make decisions about what sort of events to put on, consisting mostly of students, but also at least one faculty member. One of the students and the faculty member were also representatives to a “Minerva Council” that made decisions about program-wide matters.
The idea of the program is to create a forum for social events that was not automatically dominated by fraternities and sororities, and provide more options for students who weren’t into those scenes. The inclusion of faculty was intended to make the houses into “Third Spaces,” neither purely student residential nor formal academic space, and encourage the houses to put on events that would involve both groups. The paradigm for this was a “Dinner and Discussion” program: we’d bring in a somewhat notable speaker and host a dinner at the house with them and a group of interested students and faculty. Back before I had the kids to worry about, I went to several of these, and they were always enjoyable.
A couple years after I got tenure, I was asked to become the faculty representative for one of these houses— Breazzano House— taking over for a well-loved Political Science professor who was nearing retirement. I ended up doing two significant things in the house during the five years or so that I was faculty rep: one was to put on a weekly soup-and-bagels lunch for faculty in the house (replacing a previous faculty lunch that was eliminated for budget reasons), the other was to get involved in music promotion.
Rhetoric about the program as “The most important academic initiative in the history of the college” aside, this was always primarily a student life thing. As such, a lot of the events that were proposed were, fundamentally, student parties. There was a basically interminable debate within the program about the role of alcohol in these— I had a running bit where whenever I was unable to make it to one of the Minerva Council meetings for whatever reason, I would suggest “alcohol policy” as an agenda item for that week, because it was an evergreen topic that I didn’t want to be there for. Booze or no, though, one of the main functions was to (try to) provide fun events on weekends to give students options.
The music promotion part of my tenure as the faculty rep came out of two things: first, that the actual, physical Breazzano House (a former frat house that had been taken over by the college for the purpose) was a little unique in having a “Great Room” large enough to hold a (small) band. The other was that one of the first student leaders of the house council was really plugged into the local music scene, as she grew up nearby and was active with the college’s radio station. One of the first times I met with her, I casually floated having a band in the house as an example of something we might choose to do, and she really ran with it, booking a bunch of local acts. The most notable of these was Phantogram, who went on to significant success, but played at least a couple of times in the Breazzano great room.
The live-music thing worked well for getting students into the house. It also resonated with the Dinner and Discussion program in an indirect way, since one of the early events in that series involved a guy from the jam band moe., who talked about the music business, and then played a jam session with a bunch of students. The director of the overall program, a Dean named Tom, was absolutely captivated by that event, and brought it up over and over. We tended not to do that kind of thing, mostly just bringing bands in for parties, but the general idea hung around, and we got a fair bit of leeway from the central office as a result.
The student who was first in the leadership role on this did it for two years, and then graduated and handed things off to a younger guy who wasn’t originally from this area, but was active with the radio station. He kept up some of the contacts with local acts, and kept booking bands long enough that the idea of Breazzano House as the Minerva House that did live music was moderately well established. So, after he moved on, it had a bit of momentum, even though we no longer had anybody with ties to the music scene.
The established history of the house booking live acts and the Dinner and Discussion thing led to a first-year student approaching us with a proposal in one of my last years on the Council. He and some of his friends from the greater NYC area wanted to bring in a rapper they were into, and have him do a concert. We were short on ideas, so the student rep and I listened to some tracks from this guy, and both of us had the same instant reaction: “What a colossal douchebag.”
We didn’t want to give this kid who had proposed the idea a hard “no,” though, and have him end up resenting us, so we decided to punt it off to the central office. We said that it wasn’t something that the individual house could fund, but they could pitch it to Tom as a Dinner and Discussion deal. We figured Tom would also listen to a few tracks, recognize it as something we probably shouldn’t be associated with, and that would be that.
Only… Tom was so in love with the memory of that moe. event a few years earlier that he enthusiastically jumped on it. He agreed to pay for this rapper to come to campus for a dinner with students, then a Q&A, then a show in the Breazzano great room. The student rep and I were completely taken aback when we learned that, which didn’t happen until contracts had been drawn up and signed. Which was also around the first time that Tom listened to any of this guy’s music, and was aghast. (“Why did you send him to me?” he asked. “We thought you were going to say no! You were supposed to be the Bad Cop!”)
(This was a terrible plan anyway, because there are very few people on God’s green Earth less temperamentally suited to being the Bad Cop for student proposals than Tom was. I was caught up in a couple of other things at the time, though, and didn’t think the whole thing through.)
We ended up going ahead with it, but not advertising it all that hard, and particularly not to faculty. My big fear leading up to the event was that one particular professor in Gender Studies was going to learn about it and look up some of this guy’s lyrics, at which point an enormous quantity of manure would’ve been aerosolized. We managed to avoid that, though, and also any publicity associated with him facing some drug charges, and the event went off as planned.
I begged off going to the concert, but went to dinner and the sound check, where the guys setting up the audio gear were having a good laugh about how clueless the rapper and his entourage were. The dinner and Q&A were a little awkward from my perspective, but very popular with the students who had initiated the whole thing. One of them asked to hear about the inspiration for a song titled, if I remember correctly, “Lyin’-Ass Bitch,” which had me internally facepalming, but again, we had managed to keep my colleague in Gender Studies from knowing about it, so we had a good laugh about it later.
(My proposed question, which I only shared with the student rep, was “One of the dirty secrets of the music business is that a large fraction of hip-hop record sales are to white douchebags in the suburbs. As a white rapper from Connecticut, do you feel like that gives you a leg up?”)
Anyway, as I said, the whole thing went off smoothly, the fans who had lobbied for the show were ecstatic, and I rotated out of the faculty rep role not long after that. The weekly lunches got dropped (they had involved me personally going to Bruegger’s Bagels to buy the food, and my successor wasn’t into that idea), and the new student leadership lost interest in the live music thing. I think that last one is a shame— there ought to be somebody booking small-scale live acts on a college campus— but it wasn’t sustainable for a wide variety of reasons that don’t really matter.
Why am I telling this story now? Well, because I use YouTube Music to stream audio while I work in my office, which is where I check out albums recommended by the music writers I follow on social media, and new records recommended by The Pip, who is really into a particular brand of rap. As a result their algorithm serves me up a really weird mix of stuff— indie guitar rock, drugs-and-guns rap, weepy country songs, and everything in between.
One of the tracks that came up this week was a rap song about drugs referencing the First Edition track that soundtracks maybe the greatest dream sequence in film history:
The new song isn’t perfectly in my wheelhouse, but it’s not actively terrible, and the lyrical callback got my attention, so I clicked over to the music tab to see what it was. And it turns out to be a new track from that white rapper we booked all those years ago. Go figure.
So, yeah, that’s this week in “It’s a small and weird world.” I don’t know that there’s a larger point to this, but if you’d like to see if I ever think of one, here’s a button:
And if you’d like to suggest a larger point, the comments will be open:
Those are some neat band references, I've seen Phantogram open for Arcade Fire at a big stadium. (Also my Instagram name is the same as a guy from .moe's Twitter name so I used to get tagged occasionally in discussions/posts about the band, who I know nothing else about)