Bacchanal spring concert lineup announced

Early this morning, Bacchanal Special Events announced its official lineup for Columbia’s annual spring concert. On April 24, acclaimed rapper Ghostface Killah, glam rockers of Montreal, and up-and-coming hip-hop artist Wiz Khalifa will team up on Low Plaza for campus’s ultimate battle of the bands.

Despite its usual budget limitations, Bacchanal expanded its bill from last year’s two-act lineup of Vampire Weekend and Talib Kweli with these three artists. Also new this year is the concert’s 6 p.m. start time as opposed to the usual afternoon performance.

Each year, the bands playing the show are a closely guarded secret. In its silence leading up to the event, Bacchanal prioritized listening to campus tastes in choosing the performers to headline the big event.

“Last year I think we hit a good note doing something that was a little indie with some mainstream hip-hop,” concert co-chair Dan Weinstein, CC ’12, said. “We tried to go in a similar direction this year by trying to appeal to a large audience. It’s also the kind of music people get pumped up to go see.”

For co-chair Mia Johnson, BC ’12, the decision was based on not just the artists’ music but also how well the artists put on a show. “A big factor for choosing of Montreal is that they’re great live. They put on a really big spectacle,” Johnson said.

Although both Weinstein and Johnson are confident about Bacchanal’s final lineup, they share concerns about how students will react to the artists.

“Since Ghostface Killah did come a couple of years ago, I initially felt weird that maybe students would think that we were repeating something we did before,” Weinstein said. “But I think enough time has passed and people are still into him in the same way."

Johnson mentioned the lineups of other Ivy League spring concerts with big names—notably Brown with Snoop Dogg—as a source of potential backlash against this year’s concert. She added, however, that Brown is “charging $50 and our concert is free.”

And, naturally, keeping the concert free limits concert chairs’ choices.

To book these bands, the concert chairs contacted an agent who helped them determine all of the prices for the possible headliners. Once the club decided how much money it was going to spend on the big act as opposed to the rest of Bacchanal Weekend, the concert chairs, in collaboration with the club, created a list of artists the club could afford. After that stage, the concert chairs worked primarily with club presidents Jody Zellman, GS, and Alex Kirk, CC ’11, to create a financially sensible and Columbia-friendly lineup that was largely under wraps.

“It’s not even about price matchup sometimes,” Weinstein said of booking the bands. “The negotiation process is fun because you start to hear weird tidbits about the artists' life like, 'Oh, they can’t make that day because they’re having a baby.' One of the acts was asking for $45,000, which is manageable, but then asked for a $10,000 to $15,000 light show.”

“And that’s our entire budget,” Johnson added.

But, in other ways, the club has to cater to the wishes of the campus’s celebrity visitors for the day of the concert. “Last year, Vampire Weekend asked for Taqueria [y Fonda la Mexicana],” Johnson said.

Hosting big-name artists and holding a later performance inevitably brings up security questions, especially since the concert has had problems before. “We announce the bands later because if we released the names earlier, we would have to pay a lot more for security,” Johnson said. “When Kanye West came, we had to have people standing at the gates checking Columbia IDs.”

For this year’s nighttime concert, CUIDs will be required for attendance again. The nighttime concert will also lend a new face to the concert in more ways than one—Johnson and Weinstein enthusiastically noted that audience members will receive glow sticks.

Zellman expressed his own excitement for the concert as a venue in which Columbia students can escape from everyday ruts.

“The Bacchanal concert is a chance for us to unwind and pretend that Butler is not the center of campus social life. I expect this concert will leave a crater in Low Plaza,” Zellman said. “Hopefully this will be filled in by graduation.”