I went to the Ozomatli concert during the Week of Welcome expecting to hate it. I knew nothing of the band, except that it consider themselves to be Afro-Latin hip-hop, and I’ve always been wary of self-proclaimed musical hyphenates. Too often they belong to the lame world-beat category, the type of music David Byrne used to pilfer for his solo albums.
Ozomatli started the evening with a lame shout-out: “So, I heard you guys beat Oklahoma!” The crowd applauded. Then the band started playing its first song. The music had force, thanks to a driving rhythm section. The set list fluctuated from
hip-hop funk, to rock-pop, to covers.
As the music continued, and the people next to me bombarded my olfactory senses with the noxious combination of BO and spliffs, the crowd became more engaged.
“There certainly are a lot of bitches on the stage,” my date said. Indeed. As Ozomatli launched into its final song, dozens of girls stormed the stage and it became one giant harem – a writhing mass of flesh. This was prime recruiting ground for Joe Francis and his Girls Gone Wild Empire, except I suspect most of the girls were at least 18.
It seemed like everyone had a good time, especially the large number of non-students for whom the concert was actually free. But was Ozomatli worth it? Was this rather insignificant event a success?
“I can’t give you a straight answer because I just don’t know,” ASUO Executive Jared Axelrod told me. “For the future, if some large concert (or) event were to happen prior to the beginning of school, I would like to see it more incorporated with
Intermingle, to cut down on some of the costs as well as draw attendance to the events.”
It was advertised as a free concert, but really there was nothing free about it. The Ozomatli concert cost students at least $16,000 – money taken from the emergency surplus account, an extremely expensive two-hour event.
Surplus funds are often misused, but never to this level, and never for the reasoning offered by the band’s promoters last spring. “This is an emergency to a lot of us,” said journalism student Trevor Atkins at a Senate meeting last spring, in defense of spending this ridiculous sum on one event. Atkins later said that this musical event would foster a sense of inclusiveness and diversity.
I’m not sure what Atkins’ definition of an emergency is. Was this University in the grip of dance emergency? Were we suffering a dangerous shortage of funk?
As former student senator Wally Hicks retorted, a more appropriate use of emergency funds would be on something like the Childcare Subsidy. And if we are going to turn this into a debate about diversity, why not creatively spend the money on long-term measures that might have a demonstrable impact on students of color? But this was never about fostering diversity, because the term “fostering diversity” is so over-used that it has become meaningless.
That money could have been a relationship. Instead we turned it into a one-night stand.
The final tab for the night’s festivities will run between $37,000 to $40,000, according to Mandy Chong, office manager for the Cultural Center. The total figure remains blurry because the Cultural Center has yet to receive invoices from all of the production companies involved. Many groups donated money to the concert, including the Multi Cultural Center, MEChA and OMAS among others. This money came in a variety of forms,
ranging from fund raising to student group donations to general fund money.
We students at the University of Oregon spend nearly $600 a year on the incidental fee. Most student groups have bloated budgets dedicated to stipends, food and travel budgets. When this money isn’t spent and it’s put into the emergency surplus reserve, we should expect our student leaders to be responsible stewards of our funds. We should expect a certain level of
forward thinking, pragmatism and fiscal responsibility. What we get, instead, is ephemeral satisfaction.
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