All right – sit up, blow your snuffly little nose and dry the computer-screen residue out of your bloodshot, late-night eyeballs. I don’t care how many midterms you had this week, or even how many you have Friday – I heard as long as you study drunk, you can take the test drunk and still do okay? – or if your relatives are flying in at 7 a.m. Saturday morning (seriously, we’ve known the date for months now). Your every fiber better be trembling with the annual ecstacy of anticipation, the unmistakable internal buzzer letting you know that UCSD’s holed-up hibernation season is finally over and Sun God has officially arrived. So shed those winter coats, get naked for the Koala slip ’n’ slide and lather up all those winter-white places in the fountain, because for one beautiful day, our campus is hot for more than just science.
The fading facial scrunch lines gave you away – you’ve been complaining about the lineup. Let me guess your consolation: “”Whatever, it’s free, right?”” Sorry to break it to you, but the truth is, Sun God is far from free. Considering we’re now spending an extra $78 a quarter on foot massages for our athletes and similarly sketchy amounts on mysteriously labeled activities fees, there are only so many ways to get our money’s worth. And as long as it’s all piling onto some invisible stack of loans – to be dealt with when we’re old, boring and, like, know how to deal with that kind of thing – we might as well make this overpriced institution worth the lifetime of payback by sucking every last burning drop out of one absurdly awesome day per year. After alarm-clock mimosas, a couple beers for breakfast and brunchtime tequila shots (or whatever’s available), it sometimes begins to seem like an even trade.
But rest assured, you were right about one thing: it doesn’t actually matter who plays Sun God. We’re too drunk to remember the day stage (as Lyrics Born had to discover the hard way last year, with attempts to garner lyrical fill-ins from a sparse, half-passed-out crowd more concerned with freaking the I-House goggle-hotties on either side than racking their brains for a song they’d never heard), too disoriented to make our way to RIMAC by evening, and when we finally do arrive, the headliner finds us terribly hung over.
Hiatus (and the majority of UCSD) has a tradition of ripping apart most of A.S. Programming’s musical decisions, but as it turns out, this year’s lineup is as near ideal as possible, considering the frustrating limitations in availability and the limb-by-limb disputes that all boil down to irreconsilable differences in taste. But no matter how many times you mumble something vague and pretentious about how burnt-out Third Eye Blind is, you too once pretended your best friend was going to commit suicide and sat in your room crying and wailing “”I will underSTAAAND”” just like the rest of us. Or perhaps you’re one of those “”everything except country and mainstream rap”” downers, who seem to think the King of the South is somehow not worthy of your superiorly acquired tastes. If you’re going to be like that, just think of it this way: “”free”” Coachella rejects. It sure beats being stuck in sweltering tented confines and trying desperately to appreciate your entire Facebook music list all at once.
There’s no pressure – cause hey, you would have chosen someone better, and we’re fucking stuck with these guys – and therefore no excuse to switch on your condescending auto-pilot. Get out there, scream like you’re 12 again, and try not to feel the pressure of $40,000 a year invested in a single day’s fun. And perhaps a degree, if you do make that midterm.
