The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, March 26, 2019 — 5

Since its creation, MUSIC 
Matters 
has 
brought 
an 
unbelievable array of big-name 
artists to campus, including J. 
Cole, Lil Yachty, Ben Folds, 2 
Chainz, Migos and Louis The 
Child. In typical fashion, this 
year’s SpringFest 2019 brings 
the mighty A$AP Ferg 
to 
the 
University’s 
Hill Auditorium on 
Apr. 16 as a part of the 
organization’s annual 
lifestyle festival a la 
SXSW. 
SpringFest, 
the 
largest 
student-run 
event on campus, is 
an 
all-day 
festival 
and nighttime benefit 
concert. 
By 
day, 
attendees can enjoy 
showcase work from 
over 65 other student 
organizations, 
providing numerous 
opportunities 
for 
demonstration 
and 
exploration 
of 
the 
student 
life 
that 
makes the University 
unique. In addition, 
SpringFest 
features 
an outlet for student 
start-ups 
and 
businesses to display 
their work to a wider 
audience. By night, attendees 
can experience an intimate, 
Michigan-only concert in Hill 
Auditorium. 
Typically, 
Hill 
features 
orchestras 
and 
theatrical 
performances, 
but 
MUSIC 
Matters is breaking the mold 
with an unprecedented rap 
concert from one of the most 
iconic names in hip hop today. 
A$AP Ferg gained notoriety 
with the rest of the A$AP 
Mob on the coattails of A$AP 
Rocky. 
(There 
are 
many 
A$APs.) 
A 
coalition 
from 

Harlem, the Mob ushered in 
a new combination of hard-
hitting New York gangster rap 
and boomy Southern trap that 
quite literally took the hip-hop 
world by storm. While Rocky 
is certainly the poster child 
of the group, Ferg is a close 
second, developing a personal 
a sound that is particularly 
more aggressive than that 
of the Mob or its pretty-boy 
leader. 
Since 2013, Ferg has released 
two albums, Trap Lord and 
Always Strive and Prosper, and 
one mixtape, Still Striving. In 

2013, he was crowned Rookie 
of The Year for his single 
“Shabba” at the BET Music 
Awards. With a discography 
full of party-made bangers, 
Ferg is primed to deliver a 
tasty trap treat dipped in 808s 
and 
jocularly 
intimidating 
one-liners to SpringFest 2019.
“My goal is to create the best 
possible concert experience 
for 
the 
Michigan 
student 
body,” Talent and Concert 
Chair Marty Hubbard said. 
“A$AP Ferg as our SpringFest 
2019 headliner lives up to 

that.”
On top of a day stage, food 
trucks 
and 
pop-up 
shops, 
SpringFest is also continuing 
its CoMMunity Partnership 
initiative, which provides a 
grant for philanthropic student 
ventures at the University. For 
this year’s SpringFest, MUSIC 
Matters joined with Heal-
Move-Shift 
and 
Michigan 
Movement 
to 
encourage 
educational accessibility for 
underprivileged students. A 
variety of projects funded 
by these initiatives will be 
showcased this year. 
MUSIC 
Matters 
Social Venture Chair 
Katie 
Schwartz 
said, 
“We 
are 
so 
thankful to have the 
opportunity to share 
in 
and 
contribute 
to 
their 
respective 
impactful 
efforts, 
from 
facilitating 
local 
high 
school 
seminars about the 
positive relationship 
of music and mental 
health 
with 
Heal-
Move-Shift 
to 
lending 
a 
helping 
hand to the homeless 
population 
of 
Ann 
Arbor with Michigan 
Movement.” 
Part 
of 
the 
SpringFest 
proceeds 
will 
be 
used to support and 
grow the CoMMunity 
Partnership initiative 
further.
The 
festival’s 
social 
initiatives 
extend to all aspects, ranging 
from emphases on community 
outreach 
to 
zero 
waste. 
SpringFest 2019’s full daytime 
schedule is still to come.
Tickets for the show at Hill 
are on sale now, starting at $15 
for students with valid UMID 
and $25 for the general public. 
They are available at the 
Michigan Union Ticket Office, 
which is located underground 
at the Michigan League during 
the Union’s renovation, or at 
the official MUSIC Matters 
website.

SpringFest 2019 brings 
A$AP Ferg, other talent 

JACK BRANDON
Managing Arts Editor

MIKE WATKINS
Daily Music Editor

EVENT PREVIEW

MUSIC MATTERS

MUSIC Matters’s 
SpringFest

Hill Auditorium

Apr. 16

Tickets $15 with valid UMID, $25 for 
general public

MUSIC MATTERS

It’s not hard to imagine how 
strange the reunion of American 
Football must have been for its 
members. Their 1997 self-titled 
album, which was recorded when 
the band was in their last year of 
college in Urbana, combined earnest 
energy and understated wistfulness 
in a style that has been often 
imitated. Among a certain group of 
people it’s become a sort of avatar 
for the fleeting, muddled feelings 
of youth and early adulthood. Its 
influence 
can’t 
be 
overstated, 
and rightly so — 
the album found 
a sweet spot in 
between 
the 
various currents of 
music at the time 
that has proven a 
fruitful jumping-
off point for an 
entire generation 
of musicians.
When 
American 
Football 
re-formed 
in 2014, the members of the 
group were pushing 40, and the 
band accordingly had the task 
of fitting their diaristic material 
into something that benefits their 
status as the elders of emo, with 
other musical projects, careers 
and families behind them. Their 
2016 album (also self-titled) was 
accordingly a little awkward even as 
it was more technically proficient, 
reflecting nearly two decades of 
experience. LP2 frequently felt as 
though the group was trying to 
transpose the malaise of middle 
age to the “see-through” teenage 

angst that their debut leans on. For 
anyone not familiar with vocalist 
Mike Kinsella’s solo project Owen, 
it’s almost strange to hear him sing 
“Oh how I wish that I were me / The 
man that you first met and married” 
with that same naive cadence. 
LP2 is also a little more sonically 
conventional. It retains some of 
the irregular time signatures and 
bendy, vocal guitar playing that 
added a crucial third dimension 
to LP1, but more often than not it 
settles into a regular groove.
The group’s third (again self-
titled) album clears out the band’s 
old sound pretty much altogether, 

replacing it with a saturated, 
effervescent 
style 
closer 
to 
shoegaze or post-rock. From the 
opening cascade of glockenspiel 
and vibraphone on “Silhouettes,” 
it’s clear the band is working with 
new materials — there’s an almost 
orchestral grandeur to the album, 
a panoramic sweep wholly separate 
from the stripped-down sound 
more familiar to the band. The 
recently-added bassist and multi-
instrumentalist 
Nate 
Kinsella 
(cousin of the vocalist) adds several 
new tone colors, including mallet 
percussion, a 12-string guitar and 
a Mellotron. There’s much more 

fine-tuned detail and several levels 
of distance to play with. American 
Football was heretofore defined by a 
certain economy of means, and LP3 
feels like the first time the group has 
seriously experimented with new 
instruments, relegating the guitar 
duet to one element among many.
These songs are also much 
broader in scope than anything 
the band has ever done before. 
“Silhouettes” and “Doom In Full 
Bloom” are both nearly eight 
minutes long, and most of the other 
songs hover around five and six 
minutes. If we were dealing with 
the kind of awkwardly self-pitying 
lyrics on LP2, this 
could be tiresome 
— but Kinsella’s 
lyricism has, for 
the 
first 
time, 
a 
sophisticated 
elegance to it. It’s 
still 
as 
earnest 
as we’re used to, 
but without the 
starkness of LP2.
It’s still possible 
to hear some of the 
qualities of LP1 in 
LP3 — the intertwining guitars in 
“Every Wave” and “Mine To Miss,” 
Kinsella’s charming short vocal 
phrases — but I somehow doubt 
that someone finding American 
Football via LP3 would understand 
the exuberant energy of the band’s 
first iteration. For all its power, LP3 
is pretty obvious and even veers 
toward filmic at times — it doesn’t 
have any of the inscrutability and the 
“wait, what was that?” quality that 
made LP1 so great. LP3 is mature 
and settled without repeating itself, 
but it invites speculation about what 
the band might have done had they 
not had to bridge a 15-year gap.

American Football’s third 
album is new, despite title

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

ALBUM REVIEW

POLYPHONIC

American Football (LP3)

American Football

Polyvinyl

This summer, I’ll be taking the 
LSAT and applying to law schools. 
Somewhere over the course of the 
next two years, I’ll likely be moving 
out of my home state of Michigan for 
the first (official) time to attend law 
school. For some reason, I’m more 
excited than nervous about all of 
these things. My decision to go into 
law is not for the status or for the 
money, like many assume, but for 
the opportunity to serve and defend 
marginalized voices, to work on our 
prison system and, optimistically, to 
do my part in making our country 
what I know it can be.
You’ll hate law school, my family 
and well-meaning friends say. You 
know you’re going to be working 70 
hours a week. I wonder, though, if 
they’d think differently if I was a 
man. Men are cut out for hard work, 
for long hours, for doing whatever 
it takes to “provide.” Women, 
apparently, are not.
When I think about law school, 
I think about the hell that Dr. 
Christine Blasey-Ford has been 
living in since the Kavanaugh 
hearing, while her abuser sits on the 
Supreme Court and accepts visiting 
positions at law schools. I wonder 
if someone like him will be my 
professor. I think about President 
Trump’s 
continued 
accusations 
against and slandering of Hillary 
Clinton almost three years after the 
election has ended. I think of how 
the President can be excused for 
what seems like anything, while a 

small misstep by a female politician 
amounts to an explosion of criticism 
and dire threats to their careers. 
Congresswoman 
Ocasio-Cortez 
paid more of a consequence for 
dancing in college than Trump did 
for openly boasting about his tactics 
for sexual assault. I think about how 
the female candidates in the next 
election cycle will almost positively 
be treated the same — What is 
she wearing? Shouldn’t she be a 
mother? Won’t she be too moody and 
unpredictable to serve our country?
Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister 
of New Zealand, mourned with 
her country after the Christchurch 
attack less than two weeks ago. Six 
days later, Ardern announced that 
all military-style semiautomatic 
weapons 
and 
ammunition 
magazines that can be modified 
into these types of weapons will 
be nationally banned. Our U.S. 
government offered only thoughts 
and prayers for victims of countless 
mass shootings in our country; I was 
going to list some here, but there 
are too many. Ardern, a woman, 
proved more fit to serve her people 
after one instance of hate and 
violence than our current and past 
administrations have in hundreds 
of opportunities to do the same.
I’m conscious of my gender when 
I call myself a writer, too. I once said 
this at a party and was asked, Oh, so 
what do you write? You journal and 
stuff, right? I quickly learned that 
men are also valiant for choosing 
a creative field over a professional 
one — their work is important, 
profound, 
world-changing 
— 
while women are simply wasting 
their time. Women writers have 

historically been written off as 
“emotional” or “melodramatic.” 
Male writers — Ernest Hemingway, 
J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace 
— have been hailed as literary 
icons for years, if not decades. I’ve 
never been in a writing workshop 
where David Foster Wallace has not 
been brought up and subsequently 
praised. I always sit silently, letting 
the 
discussion 
progress 
into 
something like worship. In my head, 
I wonder if we will ever talk about 
his abuse toward Mary Karr — a 
brilliant writer, perhaps even more 
brilliant than Wallace himself. I 
wonder if we’ll ever talk about 
Hemingway’s alcoholism and bar 
fights in a way that isn’t glamorous, 
or Salinger’s abusive relationship 
with Joyce Maynard when she was 
only 18 and he was 53, which she 
has been ostracized and blamed 
for for almost 50 years. I’ve had 
men who’ve never taken a creative 
nonfiction class, or even read a 
memoir for that matter, explain to 
me how to master the art of creative 
nonfiction, even after I’d told them 
that I’m a creative nonfiction writer 
with countless workshops and 
essays and memoirs under my belt.
We should look to Ardern for 
example. We should look to our 
female writers, lawyers, politicians, 
teachers and mothers’ examples. 
We ignore women doing hard and 
just work simply because they 
are women. If we allow women 
of all races, demographics and 
professions the space to step out of 
the shadow of men, maybe we’ll find 
the change we’re looking for — and 
the change that we need.

Women push us forward

CULTURE NOTEBOOK

JENNA BARLAGE
Daily Arts Writer

