Every semester I wait for FUSA to get a good band, and every semester I have been disappointed. When I heard that O.A.R. was being considered for the spring concert I was angry. Am I the only one? Not only have they already come to Fairfield, but when they did it was free, and now we’re thinking of spending money for them to come again? Why?
And now that we’ve bid on The Roots, I feel as though FUSA is just spewing out bids. I personally am not familiar with The Roots; however, I’ve heard they are actually good. That makes me even more depressed though, because if they’re good, odds are we won’t be able to book them. (At least that’s the way it has seemed over the past four years.)
I haven’t been able to determine the cause of the lack of good bands yet. Is it bad luck? Or is FUSA just really unorganized? My feelings are more toward the latter. I have friends at schools such as Providence College and they do not seem to have any problems booking gigs. My sophomore year I actually went to Providence’s fall concert. They just so happened to have snagged Wyclef Jean and the concert was amazing and had a tremendous turnout.
I know for a fact that other smaller scale universities are able to get bigger named bands. For example, Quinnipiac University was able to get the Dave Matthews Band a year before I went to college, in 2000. I remember reading it in a letter I received on information about the college. Granted their undergraduate population is bigger by about 5,000, but they are still a relatively small school bagging a huge-name band.
Although the band selection over the past four years has not been horrible by any means, it has not been impressive either. O.A.R. my freshman year was pretty good, I heard 112 was horrible (I wasn’t able to go due to a swim meet), Howie Day was again mediocre, and even when we did get a huge name such as Dave Chappelle, we weren’t even able to hear him! The only band (or comedian) I feel has even been worth mentioning is Third Eye Blind. And the worst part is, I wasn’t even here to enjoy them! I was studying abroad in Australia!
The one thing that students know about FUSA (if nothing else) is that they provide us with concert bookings. They have all this money to spend on entertainment, and yet it doesn’t seem to be going toward any band that’s worth mentioning. FUSA needs to step up their game, get more organized, and perhaps start investigating prospects much earlier than they have been. I thought maybe this last semester would be different, but it appears my hopes have been shot down. From the looks of it, my last semester at Fairfield will yet again yield a band that is just so-so. We can and need to do so much better.
7:30 p.m. Tuesday: The Roots are pending…ok, but I’m still holding my breath. Somehow I feel something will go wrong (Jimmy Eat World anyone?). Either way, it’s good news, but I’m still left disappointed about the past seven semesters.
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