Welcome to The Phoenix’s weekly digest. Every week during the quarter, you can expect our writers’ takes on some campus happenings.

This week, managing editor Owen Yingling investigates recent complaints about MAB and Summer Breeze.

No UChicago RSOs are as unlucky as WHPK and MAB are today. In 1996, Kanye West and Common had an on-air rap battle at the WHPK studio in Reynolds Club. And in 2000, MAB hosted Eminem for Summer Breeze three days before he released The Marshall Mathers LP, which catapulted him to global stardom. This was the capstone of a remarkable run of Summer Breeze bookings, which included: The Ramones (1980 and ‘83), U2 (1981), Beastie Boys (1986), Public Enemy (1989), and Billy Joel (2001). Whatever the state of these clubs is today, they’ll always have to face unending callbacks to their glory days. 

Since then, complaining about Summer Breeze has been a perennial UChicago pastime. Covering the event in 2010, a Maroon writer noted that “some students criticized last year’s Summer Breeze for being too focused on indie music—the performers, Broken Social Scene, Santigold, and Voxtrot, all have some indie cred.” One annoyed student was particularly incensed, describing 2009’s show as “an insulting offering” and wondering, “What about the percentage of the University that doesn’t spend their days rocking flannel, chain-smoking Parliaments, and hanging outside of Cobb? Who would they listen to?” In 2016, criticizing the occasionally niche appeal of past Summer Breeze performances, another writer declared that “nobody except MAB cares about MAB’s highfalutin music taste.” 

Today, MAB is at the gallows once again—students are upset because they haven’t released the name of the Summer Breeze artists, and there’s a general sense that whoever will be performing will not be good, or at least not be as good as what the “other schools” are getting (Cornell gets The Chainsmokers, Yale gets Zara Larsson). The delay is annoying, especially considering the event is scheduled for May 16, but what people really seem to want is to be put out of their misery as soon as possible. As long as the artist hasn’t been announced, there’s still a chance it will be someone you like. Many people will be upset at whoever ends up performing. But I don’t think it’s really MAB’s fault. 

Given its $250k budget, MAB will likely never be able to lure a star capable of pleasing the entire student body, and it has (wisely) given up on booking lesser-known but promising young artists in the hope of catching lightning in a bottle. In 2003, the chair of MAB, in reference to their success with Eminem three years prior, said: “We’re always trying to find artists before they break, right when they’re on that upswing part of the curve.” This success seems elusive. Their lineup that year was Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Talib Kweli, and OK Go. 

The schools that actually get popular artists spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more than we do: Cornell spends more than $750K, Brown spends $400K, and even WashU spends over $350k on their Spring concert. Over the past fifteen years, these schools have hosted artists like The Chainsmokers, Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller, Chance the Rapper, and MGMT when they were either at the peak of their popularity or already enduring household names. By contrast, Northwestern, which spends a comparable amount to us, has the same headliner—Daya—as we had last year. 

What has MAB done in response to recent criticism and the occasional uninspiring headliner? Mostly tried to make as few people as possible unhappy. The typical strategy has almost always been to pick two of the following: indie band, rapper, or pop singer, where at least one of them is famous and past their prime, and so undoubtedly has a few hits everyone knows. Doing this has let them punch above their weight—the current budget is the same as it was in 2012, adjusted for inflation, even as the cost of booking artists has surged.  Moreover, Summer Breeze tickets are actually cheaper in real terms than they were back in 2002, the beginning of the end of MAB’s “glory days.”

By all means, we should be upset about a mediocre lineup, but if MAB uses this formula yet another time, on what grounds can we be mad about them for it? It’s their best solution to balancing a meager budget with the sentiment of these Sidechat posts: 

• “Who told MAB we wanted them to curate our music taste? Play what we want to hear rather than what you pretentiously think should be played for us.”
• “The people want RAP pls stop with these weird artists no one listens to.”
• “MAB gets 250 fucking thousand dollars and they pick a headliner no one asked for??…”

If students want Summer Breeze to be more interesting than this, either we need a student body willing to accept experimentation or MAB needs more money. But the truth is that most students would probably prefer nostalgia acts to genuine attempts at taste-making. They want Flo Rida over MGNA Crrrta—best save that for Winter Freeze. 

Until one of these things happens, congratulations: get ready to show out and get loud in Hutchinson Courtyard for Dayglow, Daya, or a rapper who peaked a decade ago.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, disagreements, or words of support, we want to hear them! Write to us at thechicagophoenix@gmail.com.