October 6, 1998

Alison Mackie
Staff Writer

Before Friday, I was a Wyclef Jean fan. Now that I have actually experienced the madness that took place in Varsity Gymnasium on Friday night, I’m ashamed for being fooled to believe that Wyclef and his refugee sellouts were more than just sugarcoated MTV entertainment.
My first mistake was arriving on the scene shortly after 7 p.m., which put my friends and me front and center to the stage.
About an hour later, we were surrounded by the notorious concert mob, all of whom demanded to stand exactly where I was standing.
I was only hot and a little irritated at this point, because I knew the show would begin any minute. Oh contraire. During the 8 o’clock hour, there was no Wyclef Jean to be seen. Instead, the stage was livened (barely) by amateur rappers from the audience.
I believe the turning point of the evening came when I heard through the speakers, “Let me hear all the black people in the house.”
Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t this statement alone that tainted my disposition for the remainder of the night. But after the words were spoken, a very visible change came over the crowd.
It’s like everybody decided to go ahead and define those invisible boundaries between the blacks and whites that terminated the possibility of being in any way cordial with one another.
I won’t even waste my time reporting the behavior of those people fueled with racial tension.
Black and white people alike, it was embarrassing and intolerable.
I refuse even to believe that those who were especially flagrant about the color of their skin were students of this university.
If these people who I am describing happen to be your next of kin or friend of some sort that accompanied you to the concert, I hope you were adamantly and openly disgusted with their behavior. If you passively looked the other way while they tarnished the principles of this institution, then shame on you.
Let me remind you that I am still in the heart of the mob that is boiling with impatient tempers and racial tension.
I admitted to myself that I was scared when the guy beside me got his nose busted as one of the overly anxious audience members crashed into him with a full swing of his elbow.
A short time after the DJ apologized for the delay and announced that Wyclef was still backstage getting high, I decided that my desire to stay in the pit of chaos had vanished.
I was getting kicked, pushed and screamed at while Wyclef was hitting the bong.
Wyclef’s appearance on stage a little after 9 p.m. still was not enough to reroute the climaxing frustration.
They proved to be performers instead of musical artists, and even then they were barely decent performers.
The band didn’t even try to disguise the fact that they had no inspiration to put on a $20 show.
The meat of the show consisted of 30-second excerpts from Wyclef tunes that were manipulated into weed hymns, such as, “I’ll be smoking ‘til November.”
Did Wyclef and his refugee rejects assume that ASU students would appreciate a delayed, halfass set of songs as much as a wellrehearsed display of their talent?
Well, this little mountain university has once again been underestimated.
The crowd was not at all satisfied by their dope smoking chants that in 1998 almost sound like cliches.
News flash to Wyclef: We’ve been smoking dope for a while now.
Maybe on other stages their musical showing indeed lives up to the Jamaican beat recordings and their refugee reputation that we are familiar with.
That offends me even more.
I would imagine that it is this particular point that feels like a slap in the face to the APPS organization who, no doubt, works hard to bring these kinds of big name groups to our campus.
The concert was tacky, and not to mention an insult to ASU students’ ability to distinguish between musical talent and crap.
I hope, like me, at least that the concert was an excuse for students to be with friends.
In the end, I would say that the concert was not worth the time, the money or the effort.