Cold War Kids and Jeremih to headline Spring Week

Wellesley College’s annual Spring Week, hosted by the Schneider Board of Governors (SBOG), marks the end of the school year with Cold War Kids and Jeremih at the Last Day of Classes (LDOC) concert.

Spring Week 2012 began with the ‘Kick Off Party in the Pub’ on the night of Thursday, April 12. The events this year included Marathon Monday, The Great Race, the Ethos Fashion Show, the Tailgating Party, Spring Fling and the Turquoise Jeep concert.

To get more students involved with Spring Week festivities, SBOG collaborated with other  on-campus organizations to sell food and drinks as a fundraiser at LDOC.

SBOG also broke the convention of holding the Tailgating Party on West Campus, choosing instead to host the event in the Dower parking lot. Additionally, WZLY hosted only one concert, Turquoise Jeep, instead of the traditional two.

“Usually, we try and bring a band from two different genres,” Karin Robinson ’12, the special events coordinator of WZLY, stated. “Sometimes, you can be imbued with tradition and [think], ‘But we always have two concerts,’ [and that] prevents you from improving the station.”

Planning for Spring Week begins in the fall semester. SBOG starts gathering ideas for the selection of performers in Google Group online forums. Soon afterwards, SBOG launches an online poll with a diverse pool of artists to choose from to gauge student interest.

Of the online poll of performers presented by SBOG, Turquoise Jeep was one of the most popular selections. Consequently, SBOG decided to collaborate with WZLY in bringing the artist.

SBOG also worked to appeal to both East Campus and West Campus this year by hosting events in both areas.

“We had Tailgate on East Campus—I think that was the biggest difference,” Nathalie Davidson ’14, social media manager of SBOG, said. “And we worked with PERA (Department of Physical Education, Recreation and Athletics) to sponsor The Great Race, which brought a lot of people to the East campus.”

As the student committee in charge of coordinating large-scale events with the student activities fee, SBOG must ensure all events are made accessible to the different interests of the student body.

Davidson said, “SBOG’s goal is really to get more of East campus involved. We also had Ferris Bueller playing in Stone-D courtyard and a tailgate just to make sure that East campus knows we love them too.”

SBOG also revised the arrangement of the concert series. Instead of scheduling a series of concerts on Marathon Monday, SBOG dispersed the concerts in a more balanced format.

“The biggest difference [was] having two artists on the last day of classes,”  Davidson offered. “Last year, we had a concert on Sunday night, and then we had Marathon Monday and then we had a concert on Marathon Monday night.... We all thought that was so exhausting for everybody. So we’re spreading it out more and having a big blowout on the last day of classes.”

Furthermore, SBOG and WZLY directed their focus toward diversifying the music selection during Spring Week.

“Jeremih and Cold War Kids—they’re two very different artists,” Davidson said. “We do take into consideration having hip-hop, rap, pop or kitschy Turquoise Jeep-type things. We try to keep everything as diverse as possible.”

“In the past few years, we’ve been talking about diversifying, because WZLY has a reputation for bringing folk rock groups that people don’t know,” Robinson said. “So we wanted to latch onto something that people would get excited about, that they would know, and that also required a bit of a larger budget.”

Although the results of the online poll reflected a preference for Turquoise Jeep, many students still expressed their discontent with the musical selection. SBOG and WZLY acknowledged that despite their efforts to reach consensus among students, discontent is inevitable.

“I think most of the campus was pretty happy with Turquoise Jeep, but of course there’s always going to be criticism,” Davidson said. “That’s the difficult part about being on SBOG. You can’t please everybody.”

“People [have] complained that Cold War Kids and Apache Relay were better choices, [while] Turquoise Jeep and Jeremih were bad [choices],” Robinson explained. “We see a genre dichotomy going on, where Cold War Kids and Apache Relay are folk rock, [while] Turquoise Jeep and Jeremih are hip-hop and R&B.”