At WBAR, Event Coordinator Karen Fu Aims for Accessibility

This weekend the annual WBAR-Mitzvah will take over the lower level of McIntosh. Playing at the event is a surprisingly accessible, catchy collection of groups. It's not to say that past lineups have been different, but when you run after the absolute best of the noise-rock movement in New York, which WBAR has been able to do, catchy is not exactly the phrase most likely to come to mind.

Both the event's lineup and the vague misconceptions associated with the club perfectly match the girl behind the events. That girl is Karen Fu, BC '07, the WBAR events coordinator and manager of events like this Saturday's WBAR-Mitzvah and the end-of-year WBAR-B-Q.

For better or worse, every club has stereotypes associated with it, and the one most commonly placed on WBAR is placed on college stations everywhere: music snobbery. What people tend to forget is that taste in music has nothing to do with personality. That's where Karen Fu comes in.

If personal Web sites are reflections of how we want to present ourselves, then Fu's desired persona is about as far from cutesy statements filled with digital smiley faces as you can get. Her online pages opt for abstraction and enigmatic phrases and images. But the girl behind the sites proves that taste in music and certain images don't always coincide with a set personality.

Fu is an instantly engaging, bubbly sort of person who, if anything, best fits the stereotype of a laid-back Californian. She has been involved with WBAR since the summer after her first year and became events coordinator this semester.

It's a position she wanted in order to become more involved after a semester abroad. She said that she didn't "especially want events coordinator," but she took whatever was open at the time. Fu says she is in it for the experience, insisting that she's "not the kind of person who wants to be music director or anything."

This sort of laid-back personality can only help in a position that requires a person to deal not only with arranging and publicizing events but with such fun tasks as dealing with Lerner Hall and security, two jobs not for the faint of heart. She also runs the Rent-a-DJ program, which sends out intrepid WBAR DJs to use their skills outside of the station. Recently Fu even tried out DJing in a bar for her first time (verdict: fun, and she might try it again).

Fu's casual persona seems to have affected how she comes at event planning for the station. While she says that last semester it was a goal to try to find space downtown for shows, Fu's focus now is creating good shows up here with a focus on drawing in fans from the school and the community. Her idea is to "try to make it eclectic," though she did say that lineups will mostly be college rock. This time, however, there are two artists who are decidedly not college rock and who are fairly representative of Fu's own tastes.

First, there's Ris Paul Ric, formerly of Q and Not U, who switched to much more soulful stylings when that band broke up. And then, there is the slightly comical hip-hop duo of Ghost Blazer, which will be only the second hip-hop group to come to a WBAR event in the past couple of years. The two groups fall under the genres of music Fu lists off as her favorites, including "old-school hip-hop, Motown, and soul." Not exactly your college rock staples.

Fu said she started playing hip-hop on her first actual show (she started as a substitute for an '80s show), because it was a 4 to 6 a.m. morning slot with a friend and they "had a lot of fun not censoring ourselves."

From there, Fu delved into the genres responsible for some of the biggest dance songs in existence, the songs that have come to represent parties, happiness, and fun in our culture. More than any preconceived notions or stereotypes, Fu's taste in music characterizes her personality.