Emily Ehrensperger ’21 | Assistant Arts Editor
Fresh off of her debut tour through Europe, singer Madison McFerrin performed songs from her two recent EPs on Saturday, Feb. 23, in Sweeney Concert Hall. The daughter of music legend Bobby McFerrin (among his many accomplishments the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”), she exhibited her own unique style that explored soulful, sensual a cappella through electronic looping.
Walking through SCMA’s newest exhibit, I couldn’t get the chorus of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” out of my head: “Don’t cry / don’t raise your eye / it’s only teenage wasteland.” The song’s otherworldly warning seems to be woven throughout the artwork in “Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials,” an exhibit that documents the past, present and future of plastics and human existence. The 20th century got to enjoy the thrilling innovations of plastic, inadvertently creating an archive of the costly convenience of daily life. Now, the upcoming waves of youth will inherit what is left of this material’s legacy: an impending wasteland. “Entanglements” confronts the viewer with the medium’s metamorphosis, asking whether the possibilities of plastic can ever make up for the destruction it wreaks.
After two years of hard work, the experiences of this year’s cohort of candidates for the MFA in Choreography and Performance culminated in a thesis concert presented Thursday, Feb. 7, Friday, Feb. 8 and Saturday, Feb. 9, in Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts. Centered around the theme of “We,” each candidate’s piece examined the concept in a myriad of unique and captivating ways.
In a 2013 interview with Stereogum, Potty Mouth bassist Ally Einbinder ’10 expressed discomfort with having her band automatically get labeled as a riot grrrl outfit. She argued: “Slapping the riot grrrl label on us just because we happen to be women playing a type of music that happens to be reminiscent of another era in time seems like a lazy conflation,” then maintained: “Gender does not equal genre!” Fair enough. While Potty Mouth’s upcoming second album SNAFU features women playing the types of confident pop rock/punk that have been associated with male-fronted bands, the lyrics of their songs do not necessarily display the same political bent that riot grrrl bands are known for.
Last Saturday, seven a cappella groups sang to a large audience of students and community members in John M. Greene Hall during the annual Silver Chord Bowl. The Bowl, a well respected collegiate a cappella showcase in Western Massachusetts, celebrated its 35th year with this performance.
As the spring semester starts and the temperature continues to drop, it’s tempting to never leave your dorm room. Take a break from studying and venture out to Smith’s Museum of Art, where several of this month’s exhibits will take your mind off of the freezing weather outside.
Until the fifth episode of its second season, “Grown-ish” didn’t seem to understand its target audience. A cursory glance at the show could suggest otherwise. After all, it seems to have all the fixings of a show that would appeal to a Gen Z audience. The cast is hot and diverse. The show’s Twitter savvily abstains from starting its tweets in upper case. Its Instagram features clips of its characters clapping back in a way that is just almost funny. And the premise of the show does seem like it could yield some relatable situations: it follows Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her group of friends at the fictional university Cal-U. Each of the friends has one or two identities—Republican, Jewish, drug dealer, stoner—in which the writers have rooted their personalities, which are drawn just distinctly enough that they could be real people.
There seems to be something about the “bury the gays” trope that screenwriters just can’t get enough of. You can find it in everything, from Degrassi to NCIS to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you find a non-straight or non-cisgender character you like, chances are that they’ll be killed off, kicked out of their home to never be seen again or otherwise conveniently erased from the main storyline. Are LGBTQIA+ folks in the media always doomed to a bleak future, or can room be made for more positive endings?
Are you lonely? If you’re a college student, the answer is likely to be yes. A 2017 survey on 48,000 university students found that 64 percent of them felt “very lonely” in the past 12 months, and reports of depression and anxiety have been increasingly on the rise in America.
If you’re South Asian, or South Asian American or friends with someone from either demographic, you’ve probably heard about Netflix’s latest addition to the political comedy genre: “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.”
