Busta Rhymes will spotlight fall concert

Whoo-Hah. Busta Rhymes is going to put the campus in check.

Busta Rhymes will be the featured act at this year's fall concert, the USG announced yesterday in an campus-wide e-mail. Busta Rhymes, who will appear onstage at 10 p.m., will be playing at Dillon Gym on Nov. 10. The USG will be selling tickets at Dillon on Wednesday and Thursday.

"The people that have found out have been talking about it," said USG social chair Carolyn Chao '01, who organized the event. "I think that people are really excited about it."

The USG, which has been working on securing Busta Rhymes for more than a month, will be financing the show at a cost of $40,000, which is $5,500 shy of its total budget for the fall concert, according to Chao.

Busta Rhymes, whose opening act has not been determined, is best known for his hip-hop prose and original musical style. He is the creator of four albums — the most recent, "Anarchy" was released this September. He has appeared in the movie "Higher Learning" and co-starred in a re-make of "Shaft."

Because of the nature of his music, Busta Rhymes is a far cry from the sounds of the Indigo Girls, who performed at the USG-sponsored concert last spring. And this difference in music genre was exactly what officers of the USG were seeking.

"We wanted to appeal to a different audience," said USG president PJ Kim '01. "You can't please everyone at one time with one musical choice. We really want to present the campus with a variety."

Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne said Busta Rhymes would provide a nice change to the type of music that the USG has recently featured.

"I think Busta Rhymes is a great choice for the fall concert. We obviously are trying to make sure that diverse music genres are being represented in the concerts that the University sponsors," Dunne said.

"There isn't one artist that is going to please everyone, and we have to keep that in mind. We want that in the span of a student's four years here, there is one concert that the student is excited about."

Dunne also said that though the Indigo Girls concert was a nearly sold-out event, his office did receive a few complaints about the choice of the group. "I think that it's obvious that each student reacts differently to each concert. And some did not think that the Indigo Girls were a good choice," he said. "So we try to make sure that different artists of different genres are represented."

The USG expects to sell close to the 2,000-ticket limit for the Busta Rhymes concert, as it has for the past few seasonal concerts.

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"The Indigo Girls sold out, Ben Folds Five sold 1,700 tickets and Chris Rock was sold out," Dunne said. "In recent history, these concerts have held a strong track record, with each coming close to being sold out. It's hard to know for sure how popular this one will be."

Though USG officers said the ticket price has not been determined, they are not looking to make a profit.

"If you look at the difference in price between what the USG is offering and the price that tickets at Hamilton Ballroom sell at in New York City, you see that these tickets don't cost that much money," Dunne said. "Our main priority is placed on making this University-sponsored event as accessible as possible."