Campus Rockers Unleash Onslaught

By HENRY M. COWLES

Crimson Staff Writer



After last year’s collapse of Freefall, Harvard’s most famous pop-rock heartthrob quintet, some worried that music at the College was at its nadir.

Not so. Just as Freefall persevered, with some members branching off to form the Dharma Seals, so many student bands have, with the help of loyal fan bases, overcome venue and technical limitations, strict noise rules, and at-times tepid peer response.

Arts First weekend looks to celebrate all the acts that have overcome these obstacles. The schedule is peppered with a variety of performances from some of Harvard’s most talented (and quirky) student acts. With the bitter taste of Wyclef freshly washed away by the clean piquancy of Ben Folds, music at Harvard has never seen a brighter tomorrow.

(All of the bands listed below have Myspace.com sites featuring more information and streaming tracks).

Plan B for the Type A’s

As Harvard’s only all-girl punk group, Plan B for the Type A’s, who bill themselves as “hot grrl rock,” have their work cut out for them. Wading into a tightly-packed, male-dominated music circle two years ago, the ladies of Plan B never disappointed and never looked back.

“We don’t play to please the audience so much as we play to ourselves,” says Karima M. Porter ’07, the band’s lead singer. The band’s ideas about women’s position in society shapes its approach to music. “We don’t have any really happy lyrics,” Porter adds. “At all.”

The heaviness of their message certainly shouldn’t scare anyone away, however, and the band’s wide array of influences (which, Porter insists, range from Joanna Newsom to Slayer) means that there will be something in its set for every rock fan.

Playing at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday in Loker Commons, Plan B’s brand of melodic punk promises to please. With a wide range of new and old songs, from angry sounding numbers with angry lyrics to happier songs with angry lyrics, everyone should find a beat hard to resist and a message hard to ignore.

Major Major

Major Major is probably the most straightforward rock group on campus right now. “We don’t do the punk thing,” says Socrates R. Cruz ’06, who characterizes the band’s influences as “mainly” U2, Radiohead, and Pink Floyd.

Their sound is alternative/classic rock, with the occasional Santana-inspired Latin flourish. The presence of two lead guitarists (Cruz shares the duties with Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey ’08, who is also a Crimson Arts executive) keeps the generally upbeat music soaring—especially live, where the band is at its best.

The band’s jammier side, Cruz insists, makes catching live shows even more of a treat. They don’t play a lot of covers—though college audiences often want them—but they make up for it with energetic, well-crafted originals and enough improvisation to sate the average hippie.

Taking the Holyoke Center stage this Sunday at 3 p.m. , Major Major— with its dueling guitars, Latin-tinged jams, and nuanced songwriting—is sure to please almost any audience: don’t miss them.

So Long Princess

And then there’s So Long Princess, Harvard’s ever popular (and perhaps the world’s only) “Star Wars” tribute band.

Lead singer—and facebook.com legend—Nathan J. Dern ’07 says that he and his band “are just trying to play some good old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that people can dance to and forget about their daily troubles.”

Star Wars may provide the muse, but the band insists that they try to make the songs stand up on their own. That means fans needn’t be at all familiar with any galaxies far, far away. Those Jedi that can make out Dern’s lyrics beneath the muffled fuzz of their often-bootleg audio equipment, however, will appreciate the band’s witty homage to the stellar series.

Playing at 4 p.m. on Saturday in Loker Commons will represent a whole new world for these Quincy Cage stalwarts, but, with their legion of faithful knights and outlandish stage antics, So Long Princess is more than up to the challenge.



All in all, the student-band lineup for Arts First showcases some of Harvard’s best and brightest. For the sonically gluttonous looking for more than the groups featured above, Sunday’s Band Fest, a rapid-fire series of a dozen bands (one every half-hour) from 12-5:30 p.m. in front of Holyoke Center, should delight. Promising to have something for everyone, the performers’ self-descriptions range all the way from alt-pop to pop/rock.

Battle of the Bands victors Maya, along with ever-popular groups like Major Major and the Dharma Seals, will participate, and the event should be worth watching if just to see each band cram set-up, performance, and disassemble in the amount of time it takes a crew of five roadies to position the amps at a normal rock concert.

To get a glimpse of music culture at Harvard, and perhaps even some literal battling, the student bands are a great bet, and the whole weekend promises to be full of pop-[insert term] fun of all sorts.

—Staff writer Henry M. Cowles can be reached at hmcowles@fas.harvard.edu.