Technology & MSG

Art Attack 2008 at College Park

May 4th, 2008 by Alex

I lent a hand yesterday at the Art Attack XXV at University of Maryland College Park. This year the show was part of MTV’s Campus Invasion 2008 tour, which no doubt brought a handful of larger acts to the show: Wyclef Jean, The Bravery, Simple Plan, Cobra Starship, The Spill Canvas, as well as local band We Are Fiction. In between sets we were graced with the skilled DJ Legacy on the turntables and the charismatic and upbeat MC Sunnie Dae.

While the band list was a step up from last year as far as nationwide acts were concerned the short length of the sets was bothersome, probably both due to the involvement of MTV. Each set was 30 minutes, with a 30 minute DJ/MC set before the next set, with the headliner getting a full hour (although after intro music and scratching by Wyclef’s DJ the actual set was probably only 40 minutes, but that’s typical these days). I don’t like short sets. There’s a lot of prep work involved to put a band on stage, both for the production crew and the artists’ technicians; each drum kit had to be set up and wired, as did each artist’s copious quantity of guitars have to be setup and tuned. The amount of work is the about the same whether the set is 10 minutes or 2 hours. Short sets leave a lot of people wondering “why bother?”

I liked the sets from Simple Plan and Cobra Starship. Good music and well played. Cobra Starship — famous for their Snakes on a Plane title track — was a fun bunch, incredibly big with the crowd and having a unique electronic gadgetry feel. Simple Plan had a solid set; I hadn’t heard much from them before except their big tracks, but it was well polished. After each of these sets, the lines for the meet-the-band booth grew longer and longer. The Bravery was a let-down. Their own engineer mixed and I found it to be raucously-loud and blown out, overdriven and not nearly compressed enough. “An Honest Mistake” was their best song, the but the rest was a mixture of The Cure and The Killers though not nearly as good as either.

When did tight jeans come back in style? All the hip punk/emo kids on stage are wearing them now, almost like they’re afraid if they wear looser-fitting clothes that all of their emotional performance might escape and blow away in a weak breeze.

With only an hour, I would have expected a 6-7 song set from Wyclef and his band. There were only a handful. Highlights included the new single Fast Car, which I like. Sweetest Girl was mostly sung while hanging onto the truss that he had just climbed, no doubt making the University officials extremely nervous and thankful for their insurance rider. A lot of his set was freestyle and jam-oriented. Crowd-pleasing for sure, but I would have liked to have heard the live band play Gone Till November or 911, with his sister singing Mary J. Blige’s part. I had seen Wyclef at a show a few years back in Rochester, New York. One thing hasn’t changed: the man is a performer. He knows how to work the crowd. He gets them going, singing and jumping as one. He certainly isn’t afraid of the crowd. While some artists might never stray from the stage or might stand atop the crowd barriers, Wyclef jumps the barrier completely and sings within the crowd. He runs across the field to the bleachers to sing to the folks who didn’t brave the crush of the stage, getting a piggyback ride back to the stage through the crowd.