Word: springfests
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...boys of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy are going to swing the campus, or something like that, at Springfest Saturday. They also appeared in the movie Swingers, which lasts...
This Sunday is Springfest, the one day every year when even the grouchiest critics of the Undergraduate Council are tempted to acknowledge that maybe it doesn't do everything wrong after all. If last year's success repeats, twice as many students as voted in this fall's election will flock to the MAC Quad to see their termbill dollars hard at work. They'll enjoy the infamous beer-gulag, herds of elephant ears?...
...music. Springfest gives students a break from the tedious train of Yo-Yo Ma's, Boston Philharmonics and Mendelssohn String Quartets who regularly file through Harvard's hallowed music halls playing works from centuries past. The council imports a more timely, more popular act so that (at least for one weekend) the most studious students on earth can get down to fanfares intended for common...
Then again, this year the Council has not invited a Violent Femmes clone to Springfest. Instead we have Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, whose music tries to revive swing--which, as a popular music, has been dormant for some 50 years now. With the help of several similar bands--most notably Squirrel Nut Zipper and the Brian Setzer Orchestra--and the applause of countless conservative culture warriors, they've been fairly successful. However, it's worth asking if their music is really so different from that of the Violent Femmes of the world...
...swagger has replaced a justly dignified comportment; and their music follows in tow. Which is not to say that they are unenjoyable--they are, in my opinion, the best of the contemporary swing bands, and one can certainly dance to their music. They are as fine a choice for Springfest as any other band. But there is a certain melancholy hidden in their music as well: the unfulfilled, perhaps unfulfillable, promise of a second coming...