Through a series of twisted hallways through the arts side of the Staller Arts Center lays the green room. Normally, this pale-green painted room is reserved for actors or musicians while they wait to take the Main Staller Stage. Tonight, however, it is dimly lit, the only major light coming from the hallway and the TV provides white light. There is a certain energy in the room as comedian Kevin Hart, the latest act for the Stony Brook Concert Series, sits at the table that has been set up in the middle of the room and laughs with the other comedians that also performed at the night’s event. A cameraman walks around filming Hart’s life for his upcoming documentary about the tour. The Statesman’s Megan Spicer got the exclusive interview after the show.

Megan Spicer: You’ve been performing places that pack out at 3,000 – 4,000 people. You have the ability to say no to certain places. With that in mind, why did you say yes to Stony Brook?
Kevin Hart: I love performing at colleges. These kids are the absolute best. They grow up with you and are loyal to you for four years and before and after. It’s cool to be able to talk to them.
MS: After your divorce and other rough patches in your life, how does comedy help you overcome everything?
KH: Comedy helps in so many ways. It’s my therapy. This gets me through everything in my life.
MS: If you weren’t doing comedy, what would you be doing in life?
KH: If I wasn’t doing this I would have nothing. Though, I love sneakers and would want work for Nike. Like, higher up in the corporation.
MS: What is something you’ve learned from doing comedy?
KH: I’ve been doing comedy for 15 years, and the first 10 or 11 years were awful. It took me a long time to realize that I had to stop doing what everyone wanted me to do and to perform what I wanted to do. I have to perform for myself and not for everyone else.
MS: What was it like doing a commercial with Dwayne Wade considering his height and your lack of height? (Hart is just about 5’3”)
KH: Yeah, that commercial was great. The dude is like 6’6”. He’s as tall as I’m supposed to be.
MS: What is the worst joke you’ve ever heard?
KH: Worst joke? ‘How do you make a tissue dance? Put a little boogie in it.’
MS: That’s not that bad of a joke.
KH: No, that’s a horrible joke.
MS: This show was part of the Stony Brook Concert Series that has featured such people like Jimi Hendrix and The Who and Jefferson Airplane up to last year when Bruno Mars performed. How do you feel knowing that you join the list of greats?
KH: That’s great! I don’t want to think about it and let it go to my head.
MS: During your show, you spoke about how you loved to lie. Does lying help your comedy?
KH: Me lying is helping me be a better comedian. It forces me to be honest with myself about my lying.
MS: When all is said and done with your comedy career what do you want to do?
KH: I want to be with my kids so whatever location puts me in that I’ll be happy with it. When I’m done as long as I’m remembered as someone who did great things and accomplished great things as a comedian and puts me in the same conversation with Pryre and Murphy and Cosby, then I’ve reached my goal.
MS: What is the funniest thing that’s happened to you?
KH: I got hit in the face with a buffalo wing while I was on stage. It was years ago, before I was a big deal. If that happened now it would be pretty embarrassing.

Chiddy Bang performed at Stony Brook Sunday to a packed crowd. (Kenneth Ho / The Statesman)

“Where’s Chiddy!?”

“We want Chiddy!”

The crowd grew antsy as they anxiously awaited the main event for the night’s show.

The transformation of the Student Activities Center, Ballroom A was nothing new. A stage was set up on the far wall and took up almost a third of the space of the room. The “Top 40” music that occupied the radio waves blasted through the speakers that were set up around the room. The lights were dim and the atmosphere had a tentative feel to it.

It hasn’t been long since the Student Activities Board, or SAB, sponsored a medium-scale event as part of the Stony Brook Concert Series for the student and surrounding community; they hosted a moderately-successful comedy event on Oct. 25.

Granted, at the peak of the concerts in the late 60s to early 70s, there were times that two major events would happen in one week with performers in the double-digits performing throughout the year.

And on Nov. 13, SAB sponsored Long Island-native Hoodie Allen and Pennsylvania-native Chiddy Bang in the third installment of a continuing concert series for the year.  Like any show, the ballroom slowly filled up as the students walked through metal detectors and were subject to a pat down by security. It seems that this is slowly becomming the norm at SAB-sponsored events.

Some of the students instantly started bobbing their heads along to the beats of Hoodie Allen. Others looked confused, as if they had accidentally stumbled upon a Narnian-experience after coming in from the cold Sunday night.

Hoodie Allen, whose real name is Steven Markowitz and hails from Nassau County, rapped over Notorious B.I.G.’s “Party and Bullshit,” but with his own twist. “Get to drinking and you know that we at the Bench.”

Hoodie Allen utilized the whole stage throughout his hour-long set. He didn’t ask that the crowd throw their hands in the air at one point in time through each song, unlike Chiddy Bang, who constantly requested a sea of waving hands. Though the crowd put their hands in the air on their own and moved along to the beat of each track that Hoodie Allen played.

Roughly ten minutes past  9 p.m., Hoodie Allen wrapped up his final song. But the crowd would have to wait more than a half hour before the headliner, Chiddy Bang would come on. It wasn’t until 9:40 p.m. that Chiddy Bang took the stage for his performance. The cause of his delay was unknown at the time pf press.

Despite the late start, Chiddy jumped right into their set and cranked the bass up to what seemed like its limit.

A common question that each of the rappers had to ask to the crowd was one is becoming more and more prevalent of performers that come to the campus:

“What’s a Seawolf? Can anyone tell me what a Seawolf is?” And, on cue, like during the Comedy Central on Campus tour, the crowd instinctively responded with “I’m a Seawolf!”

Despite fleeting moments throughout Chiddy Bang’s set, the crowd dwindled as the clock near 11 p.m. as people made their way from the front toward the exit in the back.

It seemed that some  students were more inclined to get back to their  Sunday-night-studies than staying for the final song.

As of late Wednesday morning, recording artist Chiddy Bang will be performing on Sunday as part of the third installment of this year’s Stony Brook Concert Series.The concert has been in the works since “a week after White Panda,” according to Mark Maloof, the Undergraduate Student Government, or USG, President. It will take place in the Student Activities Center, or SAC, Ballroom A at 7 p.m.

Chiddy Bang is a hip-hop duo that is made up of Chidera “Chiddy” Anamege and Noah “Xaphoon Jones” Beresin. Their sound is a fusion of hip-hop and alternative sounds. The group has been known to feature samples from MGMT, Sufjan Stevens and Radio head, along with others. They’re most popular song currently is “Opposite of Adults.”

Free student tickets can be picked up from the SAC box office from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Nov. 11. Off-campus tickets are available for $5. There is a limit of two tickets per person – one paid and one free.

Look back to The Statesman for full event coverage after Sunday’s show.

Jermaine Fowler preformed as part of Comedy Central on Campus. (Kenneth Ho / The Statesman)

Though the night didn’t have the same atmosphere as White Panda or Aziz Ansari, this semester’s Stony Brook Concert Series last Tuesday was still a sold-out show.

The Student Activities Board, or SAB, sponsored the Comedy Central on Campus tour that featured comedians Jermaine Fowler, Nick Vatterott and Sheng Wang as part of a continuing attempt to revive the once-thriving and famous concert series of the last 60s and early 70s.

“We tried to get an event that would get a good turnout on campus and we settled on Comedy Central,” said Farjad Fazli, the vice president of communications for the Undergraduate Student Government, or USG. “We thought that was the biggest thing.”

The event was moderately calm for an SAB-sponsored event, compared to White Panda, the mashup duo that appeared earlier this semester. Despite that, the comedy tour brought a large amount of energy to a usually stoic Student Activities Center, or SAC, on a mid-semester Tuesday night.

Five minutes before the set start time of the show, however, there were still a hundred free student tickets available at the SAC box office. A quick look around the auditorium would further prove that point; all of the seats around the perimeter of the room remained empty. This would change, however. Around 9:15 p.m. the ticket office was closed and all of the tickets had been distributed, according to Fazli.

A lone, red metallic stool occupied the stage in the shadow of an empty microphone stand before the start of the show. RockYoFaceCase founder and coordinater Patrice Zapiti gave her almost traditional speech to get the night and crowd started, and introduced the host for the night, Jermaine Fowler.

The wide-eyed D.C.-native-gone-Brooklynite opened the night by poking fun at the university, laughing at Stony Brook’s mascot, the seawolf. Unknowlingly, Fowler asked the question that can be found on the t-shirts of hundreds of Stony Brook students, but with a slight twist.

“What the f*ck is a seawolf?”

Murmured answers from the audience of “a fish,” “a mythical creature” and “I’m a Seawolf” rang in the air of the auditorium that had significantly filled up since the start of the show.

Throughout his 20-minute set, Fowler, who has been acknowledged in the New York Post‘s 50 Funniest Jokes alongside David Letterman and Jay Leno, drew upon experiences — ding-dong-ditch with his brother at the houses of registered sex offenders — and life lessons he learned from his father.

“When I was a kid and if I came back home with bad grades my dad would take my report card from school and say ‘Wanna [sic] see what happens when you get bad grades?’ put me in the car and drive me to the most dangerous part of town, roll down his window and pointed at crack heads and say ‘See what happens! You become a crack head. You wanna [sic] be a crack head!?’” Fowler recounted.

And with a final “thank ya’ll so much,” Fowler grabbed his still-full water bottle that he brought on stage with him from the stool, announced the next comedian and left.

“You guys like music?” asked the short comedian, Nick Vatterott who was holding an acoustic guitar when he took to the stage after Fowler. “I’d like to play you a little song for you.” And with that, the guitar suddenly fell to pieces on the stage.

“You guys like stories?” Vatterott asked after slowly looking up from the trick guitar in pieces to the audience with a comedically fearful look in his pale-blue eyes. With that he jumped into his set for the night.

Vatterott, who in 2008 was named “the funniest man in Chicago” by Chicago Magazine, was most definitely the most verbally clean of the three comedians. After the show, he explained that he believes that weak comedians rely on cursing as a crutch and as a way to get cheap laughs from a crowd.

He also explained that the fewer times that he dropped the “f’ word, as he put it, the more of an effect it would have when he did use it as the kicker of a joke 40 minutes into his set.

After Vatterott’s final joke and “goodbyes” to the crowd, he was off the stage and back on came Fowler to introduce the final act, Sheng Wang.

As soon as Wang opened his mouth for the start of his set, there was an instant buzz in the air; his voice didn’t match his face. The self-dubbed “Taiwanese Texan” had a bit of a Southern drawl that was unexpected.

Unlike the previous two performers who had a continuous stream of jokes that lead in to the next, Wang’s jokes were broken. The end of one joke didn’t necessarily mean that the next was going to relate to it.

However, it appeared that Wang garnered the most laughs from the night and even got a little debate started in the crowd about the topic of pubic hair. Two or three audience members were going back-and-forth on whether or not it was “natural.” Wang stopped their conversions to continue his set but said he would be interested in finishing the conversation after the show.

“I felt he was down to earth and he was very intertwined with the audience,” Charisse Noel, a senior math major, said of Wang, who was her favorite of the night.

After a glance at his set list, and an “I’m pretty much done,” Wang left the stage and the night was over.

Quiet Riot performed in 1984. (Statesman File Photo)

Though the Pritchard gym and Union Ballroom appears to remain dormant and empty for a majority of the year, there was a time in Stony Brook’s history that music legends of the 1960s and 70s graced these rooms and various others across the campus.

The 2010-2011 academic year has seen a resurgence of the Stony Brook Concerts series, a series that in years past has hosted names such as Janis Joplin in 1968 in Pritchard, Simon and Garfunkel in the early 60s, Jimi Hendrix in 1967 and many others , with efforts to reclaim the days in which Stony Brook was a venue where artists wanted to play.

“Over the last couple of years it became clearer to me that there was a new interest in the part of students to reestablish a more consistent and professional level series of concerts that immediately wouldn’t mimic the heyday back then but would be the steps toward trying to, given the current state of the music industry and the touring concert industry and the moneys available to try and get Stony Brook a little more present on the map in terms of a venue to put concerts on,” said Norm Prusslin, the director of the Living Learning Center, director of the Media Minor for the theatre arts department and advisor for The Statesman.

The last surge of large-scale concerts that happened on campus was in the early 2000s with artists such as 3 Doors Down and Ray Charles. However, those shows didn’t garner that amount of success that shows in the late 60s and 70s received. From 1968 to 1975, there were shows happening, according to Prusslin, several times a month and even sometimes two times a week.

“The student demographic is very different today than it was back then,” Prusslin said. “It’s probably fair to say that in terms of musical interest back then the people back had a common musical interest more than is the reality now because there are so many different types of people, so many different types of backgrounds and musical interest. Back then it was easier to come together with a common musical appreciation which, for better or for worse, primarily turned out to be rock bands.”

The cost to bring those rock artists, such as Frank Zappa — who performed a recorded six times — Red Hot Chili Peppers who performed in 1989 and Pink Floyd in 1971, all were significantly cheaper to bring to Stony Brook than performers are today.

“Back then compared to now is like night and day,” Prusslin said. “[Students on the concert committee] were able to bring in the biggest bands at a time literally for several thousand dollars and proportionally the money they had back then probably went further.” A band such a Best Coast, who was the first band to be a part of the newly revived concert series this year, cost $6,000 for the artist and roughly $3,200 for the production. According to Malik, USG director of event programming, they “had to slightly overpay for the artist because of the time crunch.”

The success of shows from the past had a lot to do with the success of the student coordination from year to year.

“It came down to several years of continuity where the people who were then in charge of the concert committees really had a built-in system where they would just transition from year to year,” Prusslin said. “In the world of SAB (Student Activities Board) concerts, there were a good number of years where there was definite continuity and that was important to the people in the music industry —to the promoters, to the agents — because they knew that there were people that they could always come back and work with, which was important for the trust factor. So another part of that success, even though the students would come and go, was that the structure was constant.”

Over the years, the school and students developed good working relationships with venues in the city such as the old Yiddish theater turned rock venue Fillmore East on Second Avenue. When bands were being booked for the venue, shows at Stony Brook were tagged on either before or after the band’s appearance; the band was already in the area which made it easier to make the short trip out to Stony Brook.

A lot of local promoters would not want a band to play anywhere else within like a 50-mile radius of where their show was going to be because they wanted to guarantee that they would have an audience and that there would be no conflict, according to Prusslin.

“Stony Brook being a little bit further out from NYC and a little over 50 miles was a perfect location,” Prusslin said. He added that many times, bands would use the university’s facilities to “rehearse, have practice gigs in cafeteria building or outdoor venues and then they would play their show here, often times for little or no money because they liked having a chance to be out here.” For example, the Allman Brothers used the Tabler Arts Center as a rehearsal space and have also played at the university on more than one occasion.

However, hosting the concert series was a double-edged sword. In years past it was easier for students to put on shows and they were able to do more of them. They were able to build a consistent history with a lot less of the requirements that exist now though there was always the possibility that something could go wrong at the concerts.

“Any time you bring 3,000 people together and there are all kinds of circumstances — very little security and supervision — it is a recipe for potential disaster,” Prusslin said.

Problems did arise though and, at one point, there was a time when the concerts were in jeopardy after a riot occurred at a concert in Feb. 1991. In an old issue of The Statesman, former Statesman Editor-in-Chief and current weekend editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, David Joachim reported on a Special Ed concert which resulted in a riot in the Union which left four students injured.

“Several campus events have already been affected by last weekend’s riot in the Student Union and student leaders fear the future of student-run events may be in danger,” Joachim wrote.

According to another Statesman article by Liam McGrath, “chairs were thrown and at least one bullet was fired during the melee, which broke out about 1:45 a.m., after students had jammed the ballroom for hours waiting to see a show scheduled to begin at midnight Friday. Four people, including two student security men, were injured and taken from the concert to University Hospital. An initial assessment of damages to the Union was $1,500.” At least one gunshot was fired and one student security man was stabbed in the chest.

The concert series did continue, but saw a serious decline in the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The model that was used during the height of the concert series started to fall apart. Previously, students would come together to meet with student activity promoters, student affairs people, people from athletics, university police and other major players.

“But then that model in part just stopped,” Prusslin said. “It stopped because those students graduated and the new group of students didn’t follow up on it and that was the end of that.”

“That was then,” Prusslin added. “This is now. Whatever is proposed now obviously would have to work with the university guidelines and policies. They are challenging but they are not impossible to meet if there is enough time to work towards it.”

Janelle Monae performed at the Stony Brook Arena along with Bruno Mars and Plan B in one of Stony Brook's largest concerts in years. (Aleef Rahman/The Statesman)

The Statesman’s Copy Chief, Megan Spicer, had the opportunity for an exclusive one-on-one interview with Janelle Monáe, who visited Stony Brook with Bruno Mars on May 6 as part of their “Hooligans in Wondaland” tour.

Megan Spicer: You had an incredible year in 2010. What was that whole experience like for you?

Janelle Monáe: I was very thankful. It was very humbling. It was a very emotional year for me. There are a lot of things that happened to me. There were just things that I didn’t know were going to happen. I’m thankful for all the relationships I’ve got from the album and Prince liking the album and it being one of his favorite albums and wanting me to open up at Madison Square Garden and also play with him May 13th in LA at the Forum. Stevie Wonder sang. It’s one of his favorite albums. As far as Of Montreal, it was amazing. They are my friends. It’s taken me all over. It’s taken me so many places, the album. The Grammy’s were a huge moment for me. I didn’t win a Grammy, but that wasn’t my most important goal. It was really to perform and be recognized at such an early stage in my career. You’re a part of history in 2010, and you want people to be aware of what artists are rising. And for them to pick me it was a humbling thing yet very encouraging.

MS: When did you know that you wanted to go into music and make it a career?

JM: It picked me. There’s nothing more I can do about it. It’s one of those things that, like, being an artist is found in you.

MS: In a past interview, you said that your tuxedo wardrobe is like your superhero costume. Who is your favorite superhero?

JM: I have to say I enjoy creating superheroes. I think there are a lot of ones that exist, there are really cool ones. But Cindi Mayweather is definitely my superhero. She is the archandroid [the inspiration for her album] Her story is just so motivational and inspirational because she has chosen to actually bring together. She’s the mediator between the oppressed and oppressor. I wanted her story to really represent all those people who are finding out things about themselves and coming to accept themselves of who they are, coming to understand their superpowers, understanding how extraordinary they are and the obstacles that they have to go through. And these are all things we have to deal with in our daily lives. She’s for the people, and that’s why I love her.

MS: How do you react to some of female artists’ choice of wardrobe of the “less is more” mentality while you choose to wear more than less?

JM: To each his own. My purpose is not their purpose, and vice versa. For me, I don’t want to look like everybody else. I don’t. I just don’t. I love the tuxedo because it’s a trend setter, It’s my style. It commands attention. It is simply dramatic, and that’s what I enjoy being — very dramatic and very simple. I just choose to divide my colors into different areas.

MS: How important is music in bringing together people of different culture? Especially on a campus like Stony Brook which is so culturally diverse.

JM: Music is that common denominator. Music, basically, is meant to bring us all together. The purpose of the artist is to be the mediator. There are many ethnicities. Y’know, when I look out to the audience, that’s what I want to see. It’s the common denominator, the one thing we all love. Music has no race. There is no gender. It has no sexuality. People need music. It is the one thing we connect and bond with.

MS: How does playing at a university venue differ from playing at a venue such as the Roseland Ballroom where you played to a sold-out show?

JM: I actually like this better than the Roseland because it wasn’t all the press. I love the people here. I get the sense that everybody wanted just to have a good time, we’re not trying to be cool. This tour is really cool for me because this is pretty much Bruno’s audience, which is great. My supporters are also mixed in, but we had a lot of new faces out there and I’m really excited about meeting his family, the ones who listen to his songs on the radio, and it was very generous of him to let me be a part and co-headline this tour with him.

MS: Did that make you nervous at all that you were playing, as you say, to primarily Bruno’s audience?

JM: No, absolutely not. I don’t get scared of other humans. It doesn’t scare me at all. I think people don’t know they want to hear and see it until they hear and see it. It’s up to me to give that to them. We love what we’re doing. We’re very confident in our skin and wherever there is music, that’s my home, so I never feel homesick or I never feel out of place. I have a right to go anywhere.

MS: What are you listening to right now?

JM: Roman Gianarthur and Deep Cotton. They’re artists from the Wondaland Arts Society and their music is just genius.

It was through the initiative of members of the university community, that the historic Stony Brook concert series has been revamped. During Moiz Khan Malik’s time as Undergraduate Student Government Treasurer, he and Alexander Dimitriyadi evaluated the old system that was in place for the Student Activities Board and determined that something had to change in order to increase the success of events on campus.

“We made a list of goals and I think the number one goal that everyone had, especially at that time last [spring] would be the new SAB structure and with Brookfest being a failure last year we wanted to have a big blowout concert and have bigger events during the semester,” said USG President Matt Graham.

Graham, along with Malik and other members of USG analyzed what the old structure of SAB did wrong and looked to improve it.

“We clearly saw that there was a clear lack of events that cater to the entire campus community,” Malik said. What Malik found after looking into Stony Brook’s history was that the university was, at a point in time, a destination place for major musical acts such as Van Morrison, James Taylor, The Police and the Doobie Brothers. With the help of Norm Prusslin, the director of the Living Learning Center, Malik and, later, David Mazza USG vice president of communications and public relations, got to work as soon as the school year started after Malik’s predecessor quit on the first day of the fall semester.

Almost 4,000 fans showed up to the Stony Brook University Arena to see Bruno Mars and Janelle Monae in concert on May 6, marking one of the largest turnouts for a university event in recent memory. (Photo Credit: Aleef Rahman)

More than half a year later on May 6, through the efforts of Malik, Mazza and more than 55 volunteers, Bruno Mars, Janelle Monáe and Plan B performed in front of a sold out audience of almost 4,000 fans in the Sports Complex arena. The road to the final product, however, was not the smoothest. Before any of the logistical planning can begin, an artist has to be chosen.

“If an artist is big when you are planning the concert, they won’t necessarily be big when the concert happens,” Malik said. “So, if someone releases an album in September — give or take the radio cycles — they’ll probably be off the radio by March.” This wasn’t the case with Bruno Mars, who was added to the list as a side thought, despite being an artist that was considered at the start of the planning process.

Malik and Mazza, who was heavily involved in the marketing aspect of the concert, both knew of Janelle Monáe before the planning of the concert and decided to attempt to book her for a show after a deal with Lupe Fiasco fell through, after he signed a contract to perform at the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

It turned out that Bruno Mars and Janelle Monáe were co-headlining the Hooligans in Wondaland tour, which is sponsored by Pop Chips, in the spring.

“The really appealing part was that it was a tour which meant that they came with all their own stuff,” Malik said. “They had a set up design already and we didn’t have to design it. So in that sense was that all of the logistics came packaged together. In a lot of ways, on the night of it made it more difficult but planning it made it so much easier because they just kind of did everything.”

Planning the concert began immediately and the proper steps were taken to get administrative and official approval for the artists. What initially began as a nine-week security clearance process, became, over the course of the year, a significantly shorter process.

“Because of all the concerts we tried to plan, [the university] spent all winter reviewing that [security] policy,” Mazza said. “Now, we could potentially get a security check done in a week, like it should be. All they ask for us to give them is three reference numbers for other venues [that the artist has performed at] so they could be called to learn what happened at their venue.” Some of the other artists that were a potential possibility included previously mentioned Lupe Fiasco and Snoop Dogg.

Initially, Malik was against the idea of charging students for the concert; going as far to even say that he would feel insulted if he had to pay for the student activity fee and then, on top of that, pay another $10 or $15 for a concert. However, he and Mazza learned after comedian Aziz Ansari’s performance that charging for a concert or show is necessary.

“What we learned from Aziz Ansari was that students were more upset that the tickets were free because, as you know, a lot of students who waited on line for hours for Aziz Ansari didn’t get in,” Mazza said. “I felt like the night of [the performance], there were definitely a lot of kids who didn’t show up; the whole stand-by line got in.”

As a result, a set number of student and off-campus tickets that cannot be adjusted were predetermined by a university policy.

“It’s to protect the students,” Mazza said. “But it really kind of hurts students because we couldn’t shift the price of the outside tickets.” Student tickets sold out by Wednesday night while the off-campus tickets didn’t sell out until Friday around noon.

The money that was made from ticket sales, roughly $40,000 according to Mazza, ended up going toward the cost of some of the items on the artists’ riders – the list of things the artist requires the venue provide for them. For example, Janelle Monáe requested a dozen white carnations, non-artificial, fresh ginger and mint leaves and s chilled Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso on ice. Each of the artists requested some kind of alcohol (Bruno Mars asked for 24 bottles of beer, a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, two bottles of Grey Goose Vodka, one bottle of Patron Tequila and a bottle of red wine.)

According to VP of Communications David Mazza, $40,000 went toward the costs of providing various items for the artists. Janelle Monáe, for example, requested a dozen white carnations, non-artificial fresh ginger and mint leaves and a chilled Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso on ice. (Photo Credit: Aleef Rahman)

However, due to university policy, none of the artists were supplied with any.

SAB did have expenses that had to be made, though they were not requested in the artists’ riders or contracts.

“Athletics has literally never had anything that heavy hang from the ceiling and they needed to know if they could structurally be supported so they had to hire a structural engineer to come in and evaluate the area to see how much weight they can hang,” Mazza said.

Despite the show starting on time, minor implications did occur before the opening act, Plan B, took the stage. It was believed that the volunteers who worked on Thursday and Friday were going to be granted some backstage access. However, the tour denied them that opportunity.

“I couldn’t have imagined them denying all those volunteers backstage access,” Mazza said. “If we knew that we would have written that into the contract; we didn’t negotiate that.”

Regardless, the show went smoothly. Each transition was seamless. Janelle Monáe impressed the audience with her use of painting on stage and her larger-than-life energy coming out of her five-foot-nothing body; Bruno Mars with his stage presence.

After the show, the 4,000 fans left the arena with memories from the night, whether they were negative or positive.

But only one person was able to leave the show with Janelle Monáe’s painting: Moiz Khan Malik.