Spring Fever 2003: It’s all people have been bitching about for the past few weeks. Confused students, music snobs and even editors at The University News have wondered aloud why the Student Activities Board chose such a hip-hop-heavy bill for such a white-bread campus.

Haven’t we learned from our mistakes? Wyclef Jean’s performance at Simon Rec Center in the fall of 2000 was laughably lousy, full of self-gratifying showmanship and half-hearted raps over well-known beats. ‘Clef didn’t give us enough credit, thinking that a rendition of House of Pain’s “Jump Around” would appeal to the Irish Catholics in the crowd. It did not, and the concert was disappointing.

And when hometown hero Nelly came a year later, we learned that Saint Louis University students aren’t too keen on hip-hop concerts’ lax schedules. Fans got tired of waiting through an endless run of opening acts before Nelly and the St. Lunatics too-brief performance.

So why not hang SAB in effigy for treading the same treacherous waters this time around? For starters, the bill was assembled by MTV and, love them or hate them, the channel decided on these artists. Both Fabolous and Talib Kweli are enjoying quite a bit of success, and while I am loathe to point to Billboard charts as verification for artistic merit (Godsmack tops Billboard, for chrissakes), both men have been charting well with their respective albums.

This is a tough time of year to bring big, recognizable names to college campus. Collegiate heartthrobs like John Mayer and Michelle Branch are too expensive and, daresay, too important to play such small venues. I say wait five years, and we’ll be able to get both of them for under $1,000.

But there’s another, more pressing problem with bringing musical acts to campus: SLU students have lousy taste. And before you brand me an unredeemable, stuck-up snob, consider it this way: I find Dave Matthews to be boring and played out, and I would not support an on-campus concert starring the Dave Matthews Band. I would rather see a show with great bands like The New Pornographers, Rilo Kiley and The Shins. Many SLU students would consider that a terrible waste of money and effort. More simply, the collective SLU community has a disparate sense of what would be a great Spring Fever line-up.

And that’s the beauty of democracy; we’re all allowed to argue over aesthetic principles. And while everyone’s happy to see democracy flourish (especially without reverting to Shock and Awe™ campaigns), it doesn’t make it any easier to assemble a concert that everyone will enjoy. SAB knows this, and they are playing the cards that were dealt. The University was incredibly stingy with the space granted for this year’s event, refusing to let them use that Astroturf nightmare on Laclede Mall, and instead turning over the tiny Gonzaga parking lot.

Yes, it would have been great to have a big-name act, and yes, as a student you have a right to let SAB know what you would like for future events. But for this Friday’s Spring Fever, stop complaining and go enjoy one of the shining moments of the year, a time when SLU becomes a vibrant college campus.