The Future of the Oberlin Music Scene

ARTS & CULTURE

November 5, 2021 Established 1874 Volume 151, Number 5

Oberlin Bands Look to Campus Revive Music Scene

Lilyanna D’Amato Arts & Culture Editor

In the decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oberlin cultivated a thriving student music scene, one spanning genres, class years, and friend groups. Campus bands were plentiful, venues were easy to come by, and audiences flocked from show to show every Friday and Saturday night; artistic inspiration and musical experimentation seemed to be at the heart of the student experience. With acts like garage-style rock band The Del Fuegos in the ’80s, solo singer-songwriter Liz Phair in the ’90s, Karen O’s indie rock trio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in the early ’00s, and bands like Julian Kaufman’s The Booyah! Kids and Julia Julian as recently as 2019, Oberlin’s stellar reputation of unbounded creativity made its music scene seem nearly invincible. But, as students quarantined thousands of miles apart and returned to campus at different times during the pandemic, campus bands drifted apart and the once dynamic, exuberant musical culture began to dwindle.

This semester marks the first time the entire student body is on campus since March 2020, and the scene seems to be on the mend. Only a handful of bands play regularly, hoping to preserve a quintessential Oberlin institution: the house show.

When Dan Zanes, vocalist and guitarist for the Boston-based rock band The Del Fuegos and front man of Grammy-winning Dan Zanes and Friends, arrived at Oberlin in 1981, he was solely focused on music.

“I came to college to start a band,” he said. “I really wasn’t interested in higher education, as bad as that sounds. I was invested in meeting like-minded people that I could play music with.”

On the first day of his first and only year on campus, Zanes met his bandmate Tom Lloyd in the old Dascomb Dining Hall breakfast line. The pair was heavily involved in orchestrating the College’s music scene. They helped to book Muddy Waters for his famous performance at Finney Chapel — a concert where the Social Committee ironically passed on the then up-andcoming Irish rock band U2 — and performed weekly at campus houses and local bars.

“The best word to describe the scene back then would have to be kaleidoscopic,” Zanes said. “There were just so many people that were really dedicated not just to listening to music but to exploring and sharing. That’s really what

College fourth-year and bassist Tim Husemoller performs in Oberlin band Boxed Whine.

Courtesy of Natan Oster.

made the impact. There were so many older students who recognized that we wanted to learn. They would invite us over to listen to 45s and play music. I learned more about music in my one year at Oberlin than any other period of my life.”

For many College musicians, the need to revitalize the scene is based in this desire to belong to an inclusive, campus-wide, flourishing music community. However, most of the bands currently active on campus are entirely comprised of fourth-years. College fourth-year Eamon McKeon is the lead guitarist of the beloved band Boxed Whine, one of the upperclassmen bands revitalizing the music community. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has noticed a dramatic decrease in inter-grade musical collaboration.

“A lot of it has to do with how COVID and its adjacent health protocols basically put a grinding halt to meeting new people and getting together to play,” he wrote in an email to the Review. “Current second-years have had little to no time to seek out and engage in spaces See Revitalizing, page 12

Book Nook: Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes and Other COVID-19 Lessons

Serena Zets

As an avid reader and writer, I have been wondering how the COVID-19 pandemic will be immortalized in literature, poetry, film, art, and other creative forms. How will artists and writers depict this time of communal grief and trauma? Who will emerge as storytellers and orators during this time?

Luckily, Phoebe Robinson, best-selling memoirist, stand-up comedian, and most famously, the co-host of 2 Dope Queens with Jessica Williams, has swooped in to begin to answer some of these questions in her newest collection of essays, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes. This funny title sets the tone for a collection tackling everything: from living through the 2020 quarantine, starting a new job, deciding to not have children, traveling as a Black woman, finding your soulmate, surviving quarantine with said soulmate, navigating the entertainment industry as a Black woman, and so much more. While many of these experiences are unique to Robinson and the communities she’s a part of, her conversational and approachable tone — along with her compelling pop culture references way. At the end of the introductory essay she writes, “Truthfully, there is no ‘right’ year or moment. We know this now. Actually, we’ve been knowing this. All we have, in many ways, is the knowledge that we don’t know how much time we have left in our lives. So let’s keep rolling up our sleeves and continue writing and revising and enacting new plans on how we can make this the best life of our lives.”

Throughout the collection, Robinson asserts herself as a fresh voice whose hot takes and quips land both on stage and on the page. In my opinion, anything Robinson produces is worth consuming. Her 2016 debut book, You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, is incredibly insightful and funny — though I don’t know how it holds up in COVID-19 times. Also, if you haven’t listened to the 2 Dope Queens podcast or watched the HBO special, you must do so as soon as possible to enjoy two of the funniest comedians of our time.

If Robinson’s account of the COVID-19 pandemic is any indicator of narratives to come, we’re in good hands. Telling stories of the pandemic will require vulnerability, empathy, honesty, and humor, all of which Robinson has mastered.

— help universalize her experiences for the reader. Her book reads less as a serious account of the past couple years and more as a phone call with a friend you haven’t talked to in a while. Robinson might not have intended this, but after reading her book or seeing her stand-up specials, you’ll be desperate to befriend her.

Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes is the first book I’ve read published during the COVID-19 pandemic that directly addresses the topic. It is a strange sensation to read thoughts on COVID-19 written in 2020 that are even more resonant as 2021 comes to a close. The book’s introduction, “2020 Was Gonna Be My Year! (LOL),” reads like many of my journal entries; 2020 was supposed to be my year but, of course, it ended up not being my year in any of the ways I had anticipated. Robinson captures this sensation of loss, regret, and missed opportunity beautifully and in a way that comforted me. Knowing that a badass writer and comedian in the prime of her career also feels this way is a reminder that COVID-19 has affected all of us in both public and private ways. Her writing is inspirational in a realistic and genuine, not-self-help,