I crossed the threshold into Bates College’s “Grey Cage”, and was greeted by a glistening spectacle of flesh, ironic neon clothing, and alcohol-impaired dance moves. The one-man dance party that is Girl Talk, a.k.a. Pittsburg’s prolific mash-up “artist” Greg Gillis, was set to take the stage around ten p.m.
Traveling across the globe with his trusty Macbook, Gillis has cornered the market on clever top 40 rock and hip-hop remixes. Every weekend he rolls into a college campus or clubs, plugs in the laptop, and gets the party started in a way that P!nk could not fathom.
Even on the cusp of such an event, I couldn’t help feel a pang of state-school inflicted jealousy over the wide array of musical acts and events that are standard week-to-week stuff for those who chose to drop $40k on college.
Don’t get me wrong, I like USM. I like Portland. I just don’t like how USM seems to let Portland act as a stand-in for the social side of our college experience. Taken together, the two make for a good time, but the campuses proximity to our state’s major metropolitan area seems to have been used an excuse for not bringing big-name acts to USM.
Groups like the Gorham and Portland events boards do their best. Events like “speed dating” have been well received, but with what I imagine is a tiny budget to work with, it must be hard to book acts with any mass appeal.
Let’s not just blame it on the schools budget woes though. With Portland so close, anyone particularly motivated to see some live acts can make the trek downtown to take in some live tunes, but paying cover charges to pack in alongside the chronically hip just doesn’t have the same atmosphere as the uninhibited revelry that is an on-campus concert.
I wish that every USM student had an equal opportunity to throw themselves into the throbbing mass of bodies, get their toes obliterated by the wild stomping of 2,000 reveling co-eds, and sweat through their clothes. Instead, we are doomed to wander Congress Street in search of live acts while Bates, Bowdoin, and Colby attracted groups like The Roots, Cake, and Gogol Bordello in the last semester alone.
Having grown up in Auburn, I learned early on that Bates offered the kind of entertainment that doesn’t often make it to Maine’s twin cities. This might have given me a slightly skewed idea about what a school should offer to it’s students, but I refuse to let paying $35,000 less for my education lower my standards.
I’m not ignorant to how an endowment works. Private schools have received generous donations from alumni to ensure that the experiences that they enjoyed as students are recreated for the current student body. But this practice needs to be recognized as a self-sustaining system; big money equals big musicals acts, which equals student pride and loyalty, which in turn assures generous donations in the future.
Having spent most of last semester as news editor reporting on USM’s financial turmoil, I know that there is no secret cache of money lying around to fund such events. But the social side of college life should not end with the day’s last class, and the school itself should carefully consider what such an investment could mean down the road.
In the meantime, I’ll be bandaging up some toes and replenishing my electrolytes.
Thanks for reading,
Matt Dodge