There is something about the formative college years that brings out our need to all find our own identities — together. Er, to find our place in society by differentiating ourselves from it? Um, to gauge how cool we are by how few people have ever heard of our favorite band/philosopher … yeah, that one seems about right.
And I suppose those of us here at PLAY are more guilty than most of lauding the independent and un-heard-of. Or, at least, that’s the complaint we’ve been hearing all quarter. Why don’t you review albums we’ve heard of? That “big star” you talked to only acts in Spanish movies. Who goes to these esoteric performance art pieces in Calendar?
Frankly, a lot of this so-called “elitism” is simply a function of who we can get interviews with and what we can get tickets to. Usually that means smaller and, whenever possible, local. But, yeah, we got a Ryan Cabrera CD in months ago and didn’t write about it. Was that paternalistic? Elitist even? Probably. But don’t blame us. We’re just giving our readers what they want (right, like anyone our age knows what that is). College students (at least the ones I know) are obsessed with being able to pick the Toronto nominees before they break and get pissed off when their favorite tiny band becomes MTV’s favorite background tune.
Which is the phenomenon our cover story on page 3 examines. It appears that by trying too hard to escape popular culture we actually reinforce the exact kinds of stereotypes we were all taught (through the identical soft relativism) to avoid at all costs. As if anyone but hyper-analytical Ivy-league wannabees like us would write such a self-indulgent piece.
And just to give you all a taste of what PLAY would be like if we catered to a more mainstream mentality, we’ve reviewed the most obvious possible bar, coffee shop, filmspot, album, DVD and Chicago spot. If you think real hard you can probably figure out what they are without even reading the articles on pages 7, 5, 6 and 11. We’ve even taken you deep inside the music-obsessed folds of the one and only Brian Orloff’s brain (the man behind Calendar) on this page. But then you would miss our desperate attempts at sarcasm. Which probably aren’t nearly biting enough to warrant one writer’s worry that “people won’t know we’re kidding.” But just in case … Warning: These are tongue-in-cheek, people.
And because we couldn’t totally abandon our, what, four or five loyal readers, we also have the two bands with NU contacts on pages 4 and 5, (count them) three student theater productions on pages 8 and 9 and a film feature on page 6 that is neither local nor NU-involved. But it is about a cinephile-catering, underground movie store that is honoring a famous, but only in Latin America, poet — so we thought that one would get in under the radar.
Oh yeah, this is our last issue, btw. Hope it’s been as much fun for you as it has been for us.4
Medill senior Miki Johnson is the PLAY editor. She can be reached at [email protected].
