Major Cultures Hungry for a Teenage Riot

Two weeks ago, four recent Columbia graduates calling themselves Vampire Weekend moved 24,780 units of their self-titled debut album. Thanks in large part to a year of prerelease hype, their record entered the Billboard Top 200 at #17, a fairly difficult feat for an act on the independent label XL Recordings. The album’s 8.8 rating was good enough for Pitchfork’s Best New Music list.

The group’s video for their single “A-Punk” boasts over 1 million YouTube views and premiered on MTV2. Their world tour has, to date, included a stop at Letterman, an in-store gig at San Francisco’s Amoeba Records, and an on-air acoustic performance at radio station KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. This weekend, the band continues to play sold-out shows in England, and next month, travels to Austin for the South by Southwest festival. Still, unless you’re an avid reader of the indie music blogosphere, this news—or even the band’s existence—might come as a surprise. That’s all right, kids. I think, at Columbia, a story like this is supposed to be a secret.

While the “top news” on the University home page includes, among other things, a recently published and I’m sure highly fascinating study on why muscles get tired, along with a self-congratulatory pat on the back in honor of the law school’s sesquicentennial, nothing can be found on the alumni band sending shock waves through the music industry. Since the accomplishments of Vampire Weekend are arguably outside the scope of traditionally defined research, the band’s success is perhaps perceived to be of little significance to the greater academic community and therefore unworthy of official University discussion. It’s not some published journal article or prestigious academic award. It’s just some graduates who, along with completing the Core Curriculum, found time to practice, record, and perform their first live shows at Columbia, eventually producing a fresh-sounding indie-rock, afro-pop fusion hit record.

The lack of administrative recognition of Vampire Weekend unfortunately goes to the heart of a much greater problem concerning the role underground music and extracurricular creativity play at our top research University. Sadly, most students probably haven’t the slightest idea that Columbia’s Electronic Music Center (today, the Computer Music Center) was not only the first of its kind in the country, but a 20th-century pioneer in largely experimental music. Many of the pieces created at the EMC debuted on WKCR, the first licensed FM radio station in the country. More recently, music sampled from the center found its way into Radiohead’s Idioteque. Today, Prentis Hall, the building housing the CMC on 125th Street, suffers from routine heat failures and a desperate need for renovations. Regrettably for those passionate about the field, the CMC isn’t exactly a money-maker. Not surprisingly, maintaining the program becomes a low priority.

Talented musicians looking to advance their creativity at college fare little better. Those that want to form bands fight for precious practice space in Lerner’s acoustically disastrous Green Room (note: at the time of publication, Lerner 6 remains unfurnished and unused). Pianos are hard to come by and are poorly placed (e.g., below the third-floor computer lab in Lerner, or in always-locked classrooms in Dodge). Just two weeks ago, the University went so far as to prevent campus bands from performing at Glass House Rocks, the largest student organized event of the year, with notification mere days before the event.

With obvious administrative neglect, students are left to fill the void on their own. With bureaucratic hurdles, this has proven to be quite difficult. Columbia Music Presents, the student group that helped bands find practice time and promote shows, is no longer operational. It took four years for CUrecords, an independent student-run label that helps campus bands record and book shows, to gain Student Development and Activities recognition due to the unbearable prospect of turning personal profit. For free-form college radio, one must look across the street to Barnard’s WBAR. Since 1993, the station—with a tight operating budget and very limited space—has provided the University community with an outlet for mostly underground independent music along with putting on shows oftentimes featuring campus bands (in the interest of full disclosure, I host a weekly show on the station).

By the very nature of its location, Columbia has an obligation to connect the University with the great cultural institutions of the city. The humanities core takes us to the grandest museums and concert halls of the city. The expanding Arts Initiative finally provides discounted tickets to performances of various kinds. Still, underground music, with its long and storied New York City history, remains an academically unspeakable entity, regardless of its influence on contemporary culture or the strong contributions made by those associated with our University, let alone the enormous impact it has on so many students.

It seems bizarre that a school that prides itself on admitting those with strong creative talents would do so little to foster those abilities within its walls, limiting students’ potential to become leaders in those fields. While no band, especially a struggling unsigned college group, would prefer its career handed to them by their university (unlike, for example, those one-way tickets to Wall Street given out by the Center for Career Education), failing to actively provide outlets for this type of artistic creativity and then ignoring the rare success of alumni that land a hit record is deplorable. Remember this the next time you read about Vampire Weekend, currently on tour with a band called The Walkmen. Does anyone want to guess where they went to school?

Jarid Maged is a student in the School of General Studies studying political science. Frozen in the Ninth Circle runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com