Every year, UConn’s student-run programming board, or SUBOG, puts on a music festival for students with popular headliners and local bands and artists. This year, they managed to book Flipp Dinero as an opener and Trippie Redd as the headliner, two very popular rappers with multiple hit songs. Tickets for the floor sold out within a couple of days and people were scrambling to find more being sold by other students who couldn’t attend or changed their minds.
On top of the music acts, SUBOG provides other activities, as a real music festival would have. Numerous food trucks lined up outside Gampel Pavilion, along with other outdoor attractions before the concert started.
The first act started at 7:15 p.m., and the pit started to get crowded right before Flipp Dinero at 9:00 p.m. The energy in Gampel that night following our championship win was crazy. You could just tell people were going to get rowdy once the artists began to perform. My friends and I easily walked into the arena from the outside doors and walked along the end to the stairs to enter the pit, all prepared with our tickets and wristbands. To our surprise, the concert staff barely checked our credentials and we walked straight through. This proved to be a problem later in the night.
Right before 9:00 p.m. the floor was filled with people and we could barely breathe, yet we were still pretty excited. What else would you expect at a rap concert? Flipp played two short songs, and everyone was getting in the groove and beginning to push a little bit when the music suddenly stopped and the lights turned on. After more than 25 minutes of confusion and impatience, Flipp Dinero announced he was done for the evening and walked off stage. We later found out the concert was stopped due to people storming the pit without buying the correct wristbands and tickets, most likely due to the lack of attention and control by security upon entering by the stairs.
Once Trippie Redd came on and began to perform, everyone’s moods lifted, and overall, it was a pretty good performance. Unfortunately barely reaching 5’1 along with the rest of my friends, UConnic has made me realize that I am probably better suited for actual seats than in a crowd of taller individuals. I can’t say I even physically saw any of the performers. Again, Trippie only played 30 minutes, half of his set, before ending the festival early.
Overall, UConnic wasn’t perfect and no music festivals are. The level of organization it takes to put on a giant event like this should not go unrecognized, so props to SUBOG for their time and effort. Giving local bands and artists a platform to connect with UConn students is what I believe is the best part of it. Check out our very own local artists on SUBOG’s Instagram!