op-ed Cake - choice of many or few?

Author: Daniel Streitfeld

Thursday mornings are usually a pleasant time for me. Having no Friday classes, the prospect of only a few more hours of lecture until complete freedom makes it hard to not be happy. Imagine my utter disappointment then, when I picked up The Middlebury Campus, to realize that the spring concert for my senior year would be Cake.

Yes, Cake, the geek-rock, super-smug, postmodernist nonsense band you would have never heard of if not for their one-time 1990's hit 'The Distance'. Like many of my friends, I was pining for the alt-rock band Third Eye Blind. Equally as washed up as Cake, one can at least find in their discography a sizable number of solid radio hits - "Jumper," "Semi-Charmed Kind of Life," "How's It Going To Be," "Graduate" - among others.

Yet, unlike the members of the concert selection committee, I am not presumptuous enough to try and force my preferred band on the rest of the student body. Most of you are probably aware that there was a poll with four different acts in which students could vote for who they most wanted to come to campus.

What most of you are probably not aware of are some of the nefarious underhand maneuvers that went on in the background. On Jan. 29, a prominent member of WRMC wrote a rather telling e-mail to fellow WRMC DJs.

In the e-mail (which I quote verbatim) read "it has come to my attention that THIRD EYE BLIND is leading in the online concert survey the Middlebury College Activities Board has sent out. This might have a huge impact on what the concert actually is, so if you all care, you should take the survey and vote for SOMEONE ELSE."

Later on in the e-mail, the author is so bold as to recommend to the DJs who they should vote for instead: "Ozomatli is cool, but they're trailing big time, so I'd go for Cake. They're pretty nineties, but they're alright, and they're WAY cheaper than Third Eye Blind, which means that we'll have more money left over for an actually sick spring side concert."

If you thought that dirty politics and electioneering were limited to Karl Rove's back office, then think again. It greatly disturbs me that a member of our college community would try and subvert the expression of the student will in order to authoritatively impose his or her own. What is the point of polling in the first place if the process is just going to be distorted and manipulated by those running the polls?

I would be extremely curious to see the results of the actual poll, which were tellingly never published. This is the most important musical act that Middlebury brings in every year, and tens of thousands of dollars are spent on the show. It seems to me that there should be a little more accountability and transparency in the entire process.

My guess is that the results of the poll were never released because, as the e-mail I quoted above seems to indicate, they clashed with the opinions of the rather elitist members of the selection committee. Of course, I could be proven wrong if the empirical data from the poll is actually made public, something that I doubt will happen. And even if Third Eye Blind in fact won the poll, I do understand that logistics and pecuniary issues might certainly prevent the most popular candidate from being brought to campus.

Nevertheless, does the selection committee not have the duty to wholeheartedly attempt to recruit the band with the most widespread appeal across campus as indicated by poll results, as opposed to seemingly choosing what they decide to be the most musically significant group? My concern with Cake is that they are much less well-known, have very few recognizable songs and are in fact part of a fairly narrow rock subgenre that I would argue does not have widespread appeal. Frankly, I do not think their concert will be particularly fun, and it seems as if my concerns were shared by many other members of the student body, who also did not vote for Cake.

I know that, at least personally, I was so excited at the prospect of a Third Eye Blind concert not because of their artistic virtuosity or musical innovations, but rather because I knew that they were a band with many recognizable and catchy rock-out hits and I knew that their concert would be a huge amount of fun. Many of my friends felt the same way, and as the above e-mail seems to indicate, the results of the poll that have not been made public likely indicated that a large portion of the student body felt similarly as well. I am extremely disappointed, then, that the small group on the selection committee seemingly chose to ignore the students' will and instead unjustifiably make their decision based on their own elitist musical preferences.

Daniel Streitfeld '08 is a Philosophy and Economics major from Dallas, Tex.