Little 500 concert letdowns

There are several perks to being a cynic. The first is that you become hard to disappoint. Second, and perhaps most importantly, you’re virtually always right. Toast is prone to land buttered-side down, and all things move toward entropy.

For example, when IU announced the musical lineup for Little 500, the optimists expected another high-profile entertainment event, as in the days of yore, when the likes of the Flaming Lips and Nicki Minaj made appearances.

Hell, Lil Wayne even performed at Little 500, and when a man who can’t even spell his own stage name appears on a college campus, you know he must be good because he certainly isn’t here for the remedial English program.

Anyways, to appease the concert-going zealots among you 13 people who constitute the entirety of the Friday editorial reader base, I will admit that this year’s Little 5 lineup will be an event to remember.

Now, I suggest you stop reading before I say that the same could be said of the Hindenburg launch.

For the rest of you, let me tell you why you should skip the high-profile concerts, save your money and drink until you can hear your liver beg for mercy.

The first name on my hit list of character assassination is Afrojack. It’s hard to find bad things to say about Afrojack, primarily on the grounds that I’ve never heard him.

I’m gambling on the fact that if he’s willing to perform alongside the unmistakable stench of failure that is Sublime with Rome, it’s reason enough to damn him. If you don’t find that motivation enough, it says here on the Wikipedia tab that he’s dating Paris Hilton.

That tingling sensation is probably your sense of goodwill and ambivalence toward Afrojack evaporating. That, or it’s time to invest in a new herpes cream.

Next on the chopping block is DJ Tiësto. Unlike my feelings toward Afrojack, who was hard to criticize until I streamed some of his music, I genuinely like Tiësto.

However, I was assigned the grim job of maligning the upcoming concert, and I doubt my fascist editors are going to allow me to relent now that I’ve come this far.

The worst thing I can say about the man who gave us the eminently catchy “Pirates of the Caribbean” remix is that he is a man who has made his career remixing the works of others, whereas the last time I tried to “remix” a term paper I found on the Internet, the Dean of Students became involved.

Sublime isn’t actually performing this Little Five, and thus isn’t worth mentioning.

In case you were wondering, the “with Rome” refers to the absence of the lead singer, who died in 1996 of a heroin overdose. This is equivalent to buying tickets to a Beatles concert only to discover a Ringo Starr solo performance.

We fans of Sublime won’t be happy until IU announces its intent to exhume and reanimate the corpse of Bradley Nowell, last seen being lowered into the ground in a coffin.

— stefsokow@indiana.edu