Who says Hopkins doesn’t know how to have fun? On April 13th, Milkman (alias of San Diego mashup extraordinaire Gregg Luskin) played to a packed crowd of undergrads and pre-frosh in the Rec Center.
Though there were the requisite wallflowers who didn’t know how to dance to Milkman’s distinctive combination of pop/hip-hop/dance, all mashed up into delightfully glitchy, upbeat cuts, the rest of the crowd went positively nuts, grinding and jamming and just generally having a pretty awesome time, especially for a Wednesday night.
Milkman has been perfecting the art of the mash-up since he was a freshman at the University of California, Santa Barbara (majoring in computer science), and he just recently dropped his third album, Algorithms, on his own Milkman Entertainment label. Previous discs include Circle of Fifths and Lactose and THC, all available for free on his website.
Mash-ups are by definition sort of hard to describe, since when done well, they manage to blend a bunch of disparate entities into something seamless that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Plus, it’s just always cool to see where Milkman is going to pull inspiration from next — his tracks feature just about every Top 40 artist you could ever imagine, Miley Cyrus weaving expertly with The Jackson 5, or Third Eye Blind played over Kanye West.
Best of all, even though the groove is constantly changing, these songs are eminently danceable. The show consisted mostly of cuts off of Algorithms, including the awesome ‘90s flickers of “Look Around,” opener “Sky High” which starts out by layering Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You” and eventually throws in Queen’s rafter-raising “Under Pressure,” and “Come On,” which further mashes up last year’s popular
mash-up “Party and Bullshit in the USA” — it’s a meta mash-up!
Though barely 11 p.m., hordes of pre-frosh were streaming out of the Rec Center, the show kept on raging until a little after midnight, with everyone reluctant to stop the party.
Girls were onstage dancing alongside Milkman, the strobe lights were flashing and enough people were grinding that it seemed like a frat basement.
Some people were suspicious beforehand that any show sponsored for pre-frosh could actually be entertaining, or that any event held in the gym could be a better time than a high school dance, but Milkman came in and threw down, neatly putting aside any of those misgivings.
One of the highlights of the evening no doubt had to be “Rap Music is Beneath Me,” an incredibly eccentric combination of Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light,” Ciara’s “Goodies,” Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and Dr. Dre’s “Still Dre” (“I’m representing for them gangsters all across the world / Still hitting them corners in them low low’s, girl!”) — just to name, well, a ton.
Also of note is a track that had Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” superimposed with “Chicka chicka chicka Milkman” instead of the eponymous “Shady,” which made for a cool way to keep Milkman’s name in all his listener’s heads as the evening sadly came to a close.
Milkman’s show, as a part of a series of events designed to show visiting pre-frosh a good time at Hopkins, was an excellent intro into what the University can actually accomplish with some effort on both the part of the administration and the students.
A lot of students were definitely wary and unsure that a school-run show could be this fun. Past events have turned out to be massive failures.
But amid the fervent dancing and throbbing beats, you could hear some older undergrads remarking that this month’s concert run of Milkman, Chiddy Bang and Wiz Khalifa is better than any other artist line-up that’s played during the entirety of their four years at Hopkins, a stunning vote of confidence for the University planning committe that put the event together.
Maybe it’s just the greatness of Milkman bringing about all that school spirit.
Nevertheless, overall, it’s just wonderful proof that Hopkins listens to the demands of its student body and is is moving in more of a kinder, gentler, more mash-up friendly direction, one that all of the students here can definitely appreciate, and will hopefully keep everyone dancing.
