By Scott Gordon
They gave up the secrets of the atom, but can they give up the funk?
George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars headlined this year’s Summer Breeze, the University of Chicago’s annual private outdoor party, on Saturday night. One thing to avoid here, because it’s misleading, is the funk-dork comparison. Saturday was the first time I’d ever seen a Wikipedia T-shirt, a Very Large Array T-shirt, or a “The Gates” t-shirt, but the truth is that even students at a prestigious university have a way of melding nerdiness into passable coolness. On the U of C’s campus, one sees all the normal college types, from the squirmy dork types to the kinda-skanky precocious beauties, and lots of neutral-looking cargo shorts-and-sandals boys and casually dignified girls in between. Remember, most of these people had to survive high school.
Walking around the campus before the show opened, I felt like I was on any one of the other college campuses I’ve visited. Students lined up at booths to buy hamburgers and get their faces painted, or played around in a few of those inflatable bounce-houses (see, even U of C kids can act like toddlers!). A couple of students pranced around on a small stage and sang to some pre-recorded beats (think Dismemberment Plan and Postal Service collaborating after a severe stroke). I sat down in a nearby quad and soon got hit with a Frisbee.
As students started filtering in to the courtyard, the familiarity hit me even harder, beaming me so many weeks back to my own college days. Here were all the personality and style staples, churning my memory: The guy in flattened dreds and a Jack Johnson T-shirt; guys my age wearing deck shoes; the budding politician in chinos and a conservative dress shirt; scruffy young men greeting each other with muscular, stiff-backed handshakes. As a student at Northwestern, I used to take them for granted, especially at the annual Dillo Day outdoor concert and smaller concert-hall performances by artists like Rufus Wainwright. As sometimes happened at Northwestern, the U of C’s activities board adamantly kept Summer Breeze private, even refusing outside press (I ended up buying a ticket through a student), and only now did I understand the result: A concert full of people who didn’t seem to belong at concerts.
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Posted on May 23, 2006
