For the nights I can’t remember

Aaron De Jesus
September 22, 2016
This article was published more than 2 years ago.
Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes

“It Wasn’t Me” is great as a song at the tail-end of karaoke or at the beginning of the weird, early 2000s playlist McMaster house parties tend to have as the night wears on.

Shaggy isn’t a singer that the majority of people will ever actively seek out in day-to-day listening, nor is he one most people would think of in a discussion of the best 1990s or 2000s singers. Out of 12 albums of material to pull from, the average student might be able to pick out four songs at best. To top it off, he hasn’t actually had a studio album in the last three years, but that’s almost irrelevant when the main draw will be the peak he had close to a decade and a half ago.

Hedley was one of the few bands that could have a track or two in every awkward middle school dance growing up. Almost everyone in the crowd should be able to pick out a few songs, and everyone’s experience will be vastly different based on their age considering the schedule of one album every two years that they’ve strictly followed. Like Shaggy, it’s unlikely for anyone who wasn’t a genre specialist, or a fan in general, to be able to name more than four songs at best.

With the Homecoming concert budget allocation this year being relatively close to previous years, the selection didn’t have the niche appeal of Dean Brody, the flash of Lil Jon or the more modern relevancy of The Sheepdogs. What the picks do with such weird expertise, however, is pull at random memories instead of hoping you happen to be a fan of a particular genre.

Even if it’s for a few songs out of a group or the general sound instead of anything specific about the music, the ability to go back to the past in a way that’s catered to university students is surprisingly not done much by McMaster outside of the rare student initiative. Just thinking about how you used to know Hedley and Shaggy or where you’ve heard them before can be powerful enough to evoke memories good and bad.

While my own backgrounds with both are obvious through how they were introduced earlier, this doesn’t even begin to describe the full extent of connecting memories. I was never a fan of either, but it’s impossible to deny the familiarity and how both align, even weakly, with different points of time in the past.

It doesn’t particularly matter if you have the same thoughts or experiences. The fact that you have your own feelings and sense of nostalgia is good enough. Not to say that this couldn’t have happened with Dean Brody, Lil Jon or The Sheepdogs, but the likelihood for more students to have at least some passing connection is significantly higher with Hedley and Shaggy.

This is perfect for Homecoming. As alumni come back to visit the school, all connected by a common theme but different memories. These concerts are actually one of the only instances where the entire student population will be in a similar situation until they come back after graduating. It welcomes old faces to what they used to know, even if what they remember is different than the person next to them.

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in what is happening right now. Work, school, stresses, the upcoming year, the list piles on and on and it won’t let up until death or retirement. The chance to remember old times is a much needed break for alumni looking back on their own experiences, and that is mirrored by the upcoming concerts from a student perspective.

In a weird way, Hedley and Shaggy are one of the best pairings McMaster could have put out to best reflect what Homecoming is all about to the current students.

While they wouldn’t have been my first choices by any means, that is mostly because it’s significantly easier to pick something that’s relevant here and now. The two selected this year make up an ingenious combination of broad appeal, Homecoming relevancy and purpose that cuts deeper than wheeling out the first semi-big name you can book. All that’s left is for them to deliver, and hope that nostalgia can carry the crowd through whatever songs they won’t recognize.

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