Conor McGrann watched TV on the Radio wrap up its 45-minute set then hopped out of his seat in the Carrier Dome bleachers.

‘Ciara sucks!’ the sophomore printmaking major shouted as he and his friends walked out of the Dome.

McGrann had paid money for all three acts at Sunday night’s Block Party show put on by University Union, but he wasn’t about to stick around.

‘Ciara’s a second-tier pop act, I mean …’ McGrann laughed, his voice trailing off as he shook his head.

McGrann wasn’t alone. Dozens more joined in the exodus after a TV on the Radio performance bogged down by a lack of crowd interaction.

‘The billing just doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘You have people who would normally want to see TV on the Radio not coming because of Ciara and Lupe Fiasco on the bill, and that hurt TV on the Radio’s show.’

About an hour later, after Lupe Fiasco was finished, freshmen Sam Angiuli and Abel Thomas headed toward the exits themselves, disappointed with what they saw. They had come for the first two acts and left unimpressed.

‘This isn’t a really good crowd,’ said Angiuli, a business major. ‘Both acts were pretty good and I just think they deserved a little more.’

Such was the theme at UU’s annual year-ending concert: come, enjoy your band, even if no one else does. The disjointed lineup led to a disjointed crowd, one which prevented the show from fully succeeding.

The lack of interest in the show was clear by the attendance. The top rows of the Carrier Dome bleachers – jammed last year for Kanye West – were empty, as were the sides of the bottom section. People filled only the first few rows of the middle tier.

Opener TVOTR was an excellent band, one that brilliantly tiptoes the line between arty and primal. However, roaring tracks like ‘Wolf Like Me’ and ‘Young Liars’ were met with a polite, but mostly bored response from the crowd. The songs would have sounded great anywhere else, a bar, a club, a basement, anywhere besides the half-empty hangar of the Carrier Dome.

‘The crowd was weak,’ said McGrann. ‘You could even tell by the end that the band was mad.’

Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe tried his hardest to rouse those before him, his left arm continuously slashing up toward the sky as he swayed across the stage, hips locked to the throb of the songs.

Up, up, up, he seemed to say. Get up, drink this in, lose yourself in our dirty storm.

The crowd didn’t seem to catch on.

They remained seated through the show, chatting with friends, checking text messages or just staring blankly at the band.

TVOTR laid down a heavy thunder rendition of ‘Staring at The Sun’ to end their set before quickly fleeing the scene.

‘They wanted to get off stage just as much as the crowd wanted them to,’ said Ali Riaz, a sophomore English major.

Lupe Fiasco, clad in the blood red of his hometown Chicago Bulls with a red Po doll attached to his pocket, followed, sauntering out to Jay-Z’s ‘Encore.’ The back-pack rapper controlled his portion of the show, bouncing to cuts such as ‘Kick, Push,’ West Side Chicago eulogy ‘The Cool,’ and closer ‘Daydream.’

Lupe kept the crowd hyped throughout, even if the outstanding ‘The Instrumental’ fell on the audience’s deaf ears.

‘Lupe just did so good,’ said Ryan Merchant, a sophomore political science major. ‘So much energy, multi-talented, everything.’

Finally it was time for the headliner Ciara, the one everyone had come to see.

Well, at least everyone remaining had come to see.

It was an uneven performance, marked by raucous highs when the crowd was in tune during the choruses, and seemingly apathetic lows as movement in the audience slowed during several of Ciara’s lesser known songs.

Ciara was content to leave chorus duty to her backing tracks, opting instead to gyrate her hips, mutter ‘come on’ or ‘oh baby,’ repeatedly ask where her ladies were, hump the ground, urge the crowd to party with her, bend over backward in an inverted bridge, tell everyone to throw their hands in the air – anything, anything it seemed, but sing.

Songs? Let the musicians worry about those.

Even when she had command of the show during ‘Lose Control,’ she gave it up by leaving the stage halfway through. A medley of other people’s tracks replaced her, as ‘This is Why I’m Hot,’ ‘What You Know’ and ‘Throw Some D’s’ raised the energy to a tipping point.

This, it seemed, was what they wanted to see.

‘When she brought out the other songs, it showed she was humble,’ Merchant said. ‘That she’s not afraid to share the spotlight.’

It was a spotlight that she would struggle to reclaim. When Ciara came back, the moment was gone, replaced again by audience boredom. It wasn’t until later in the show that she got them back, this time dancing to ‘SexyBack’ and ‘Fergalicious.’

The crowd, with the Ciara-haters all gone home, didn’t seem to mind the lulls in the action afterward.

‘It was good,’ said Chrissy Johnson, a freshman IST major. ‘I liked it.’

After a while, though, the over hour-long show began to drag. Audience members trickled out as Ciara, clad in baggy black pants covered with sequins and strands of jewels and a black flak jacket seemingly borrowed from My Chemical Romance, filled the time between songs thanking the crowd repeatedly and giving the occasional self-help speech.

She even closed with a speech urging the crowd to pick up her latest album, ‘The Evolution,’ and tell their friends to buy it, too.

No encore. Save those for the musicians, too, I guess.

Published on April 22, 2007 at 12:00 pm