Smoke began to billow around the artist stage, creating a hazy blue filter that illuminated the A&O logo in front of everyone. The announcer broadcasted that everyone could fill up the pit after the Northwestern Basketball preseason event finished, so I left my seat on the bleachers. Everyone began to run towards the stage as we all waited in anticipation for the opener, RHOME & Friends, to play. Excited chatter surrounded me, and bodies began to collide with one another as we inched closer to the stage, with more people joining the pit. I stood there, sweat starting to form on my forehead as the air began to become stuffy. Just before I overheated, RHOME shouted “Northwestern!” and everyone surged forward for the first song of the night.
The annual A&O Blowout is an experience that Northwestern students look forward to every Fall Quarter. The event is a nice introduction to A&O Productions, a student-led programming board that focuses on concerts, speakers and films, and set right before midterms, when the quarter takes a turn into a more steep workload.
This year’s Blowout kicked off with a collaboration between Northwestern Athletics and Guzman y Gomez (GYG), a Mexican restaurant chain originally from Australia. Welsh Ryan Arena opened at 7 p.m., with early arrivals receiving free GYG burritos. The lineup featured opener RHOME & Friends and headliner A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie (A Boogie). The event sold out, which has historically not been the case. Over the past couple of years, it has attracted fewer students than A&O’s Spring Ball.
At 8 p.m., Willie the Wildcat charged out of the bleachers with the women’s basketball team, and then later the men’s basketball team. It was pretty exciting to see our student athletes come onto the stage and experience applause from the whole crowd.
The music finally started around 9 p.m., with RHOME & Friends arriving on the stage for their act. RHOME & Friends is a band made of NU alum RHOME (Weinberg ‘23) and other Northwestern alum students who performed at Dillo Day at the For Members Only (FMO) Stage in 2022. Knowing that they performed at Dillo, I was excited to see what RHOME’s music was going to provide for the audience.
Yet, I was more disappointed than anything else with the performance. More often than not, it was RHOME’s friends, rather than RHOME himself, that kept the crowd engaged. The music itself wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t energetic and didn’t set up the energy for A Boogie all that well.
RHOME tried his best to hype up the crowd by shouting out “Northwestern”, but the crowd focused on side conversations with other people, with one student in front of me even playing Clash Royale on his phone. By the time right before A Boogie came out, I felt bored. The performance was dependent on RHOME’s friends, and the music was often very mellow compared to the anticipation of what was to come next.
A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie finally arrived on the stage at 9:45 p.m., coming to greet the crowd. The crowd surged forward, and the beat started going crazy. He performed songs such as “This is my Shit” and “Drowning.” People screamed during his performance, and everything felt more enthusiastic than the previous hour, but some parts did feel stale during his act.
During parts of A Boogie’s performance, he shouted one-liners like “If you hate your ex, lift your middle finger up.” The crowd went along with his directions, but it began to become too repetitive to call the crowd to consistently follow your directions. It was nice at moments, like at the end when he instructed the crowd to make a huge circle so everyone could rush in for the finale. But I felt that it could have been nice to interact with the crowd in other ways as well.
I enjoyed the vibes that the music artists created with people around me, but their performances weren’t as energizing as expected. It constantly felt like I was craving more, which A&O usually promises to accomplish with its events. They’re phenomenal at listening to student voices, bringing Claire Saffitz for a speaker event and Leon Thomas for the A&O Ball last year, but this time it did not land well.
The refreshing energy in the beginning with Northwestern Athletics, to the then lackluster performance by RHOME, to A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s electric performance left me feeling very dazed. All of the different energies of each performance didn’t synergize, and I felt as though I was tossed from boredom to excitement in a span of a couple of minutes. Even though the event sold out, I do not just wish for a better performance from the artists, but a more unified vision for A&O’s future music events.
