We interviewed the King of Rites ahead of this weekend’s mayhem

This weekend the long-awaited Rites of Spring will be upon us, drunken merriment and all. In our final push before exams, everyone will be looking for an out, whether that’s the smoother Candid and Bad Suns, electro from Porter Robinson or rap styles by Lil’ Dicky, Future and Kat Dahlia.

Rites is a uniquely Vanderbilt experience, often gaining national acclaim as one of the nation’s best college music festivals. When I told my dad about it, he thought it was some sort of pagan ritual. It basically is.

The Vanderbilt Programming Board’s Music Group – just since I’ve been here – has brought J. Cole, Childish Gambino, Ludacris, 2 Chainz, Steve Aoiki, The Chainsmokers, Misterwives, Chance the Rapper, Young the Giant, Portugal. The Man, Wiz Khalifa, Kendrick Lamar, Third Eye Blind… artists that play at international music festivals and concerts for tens of thousands of audiences.

How come we’re so lucky?

We sat down with senior Kern Vohra, the head honcho of VPB Music Group, to talk about this year’s Rites lineup, and the general process of putting Rites together. Although ‘process’ may be too sterile a term for the countless hours of work the Music Group puts into bringing renowned artists to campus for two full days and one cheap ticket price.

Considering I’ve harassed Kern over the past couple of years to bring Chromeo and Tame Impala to campus, I’m thankful he still agreed to talk with me. Here’s what he said.

What is your official title for VPB? How long have you been involved?

Right now, I’m Chair of Music Group – you’re either a member of the group or the chair. I joined my freshman year. New members get onto the group in the spring of each year. And while we’ve instituted a re-application process, once you’re in it, you’re pretty much in.

Music Group seems to be a ton of work. Do you guys find you have enough manpower to get everything done?

We’re thinking about new subcommittees to handle specific tasks, which would make things more efficient. And as far as the size right now there are pros and cons. It’s nice to get everyone in a room and considerably easier to get everyone to chip in, so you don’t have a body where people feel like they aren’t contributing.

On the downside, marketing is tougher, and we have to be more strategic about how we use our time. But I like the small model for this, and I think the other nice thing about it is that we have a lot of university support.

What was VPB’s goal for Rites this year? Anything specific? 

The annual basis is the goal of putting on the absolute best college music festival in the country.

This year, given the pivot that we made on Quake in terms of genre selection, there was much more of a focus in hip-hop and EDM, and Friday lineup support for Rites. At the end of the day we wanted to bring big artists. Due to certain events and availabilities we split hip-hop over two days. It’s a solid show and it’s selling pretty well.

Were you looking to change anything in relation to past Rites?

I think so much of Rites comes down to constraint – who’s available, really, for what prices. We go into every single show we do with a strategy – genre and structure of what we want the show to look like

Artist prices are going up, over the past years we’ve noticed that, in general, Vandy students don’t show up till 8:00 or 8:30 at the earliest. We wanted to cater to that and so we felt alright condensing the lineup a bit. Students are excited about the lineup this year.

How have the student body’s music tastes changed since you’ve been here at Vanderbilt and especially since working with VPB?

What’s very interesting is the disparity between what students actually want and what people say in Music Group applications. When you look at these applications – and I’ve read a lot – they say we don’t bring a lot of country or rock. Well, we did that with Quake and we all saw how Quake went.

Hip-hop and EDM dominated this year’s Rites survey along with big name Indie bands. I don’t think that has changed, given where we are geographically and given the demographic of the student body. I think hip-hop, big alt rock bands and DJs drive the most excitement.

Were there any other artists that you guys were really looking to pull in, but just couldn’t work out?

Sure. The reason we send out the survey is because that’s what we take the most seriously. And it’s not just who got the most votes but who got the most votes per tier. We asked students to rank artists – who was getting ranked highest the most times. We looked at artists as percentages of total high ranking votes. We wanted to know not just who students wanted, but how badly students wanted them.

We looked at the top and it was very big in hip-hop – Future and Lil’ Dicky did fantastic on the survey. In terms of EDM, Porter wasn’t on the survey, but he really reflected not just Vandy’s, but Nashville’s taste in EDM.

So with all of the time that you guys spend organizing these artists to come here, are you actually able to get to know them? 

It’s not like I’m able to chat with Porter Robinson or his manager; there’s still a couple degree of separation. We work with a middle-buyer based out of Florida, and she’s our point person with agencies and tour managers. This simplifies our process considerably, so we don’t have to contact agents individually. We do our negotiations and counters through her.

But in regards to smaller-name artists, you guys often bring up-and-coming groups that eventually become huge down the road. How do you predict and find these artists?

It’s pretty incredible what a room of 15 kids can find on the internet, honestly. 15 of the biggest music nerds in the school in that room, all of us are constantly on Sound Cloud, Spotify, Hype Machine trying to find the next big thing. That’s kind of the art side.

From the more scientific side, we look at a lot of social media numbers, chart positions, gross revenue, who’s heating up, who’s dropping albums at what time. For example, last year with Chance, we knew Surf was coming out sometime around April or May. And then it didn’t, but because we had him here right before, a bunch of Vandy kids started listening to Surf.

So to change topics a little bit: how about that Slant lineup from last year? You changed the manner of lineup release, but did you have to take anything else from that incident into consideration?

At the time, I woke up and I wasn’t stoked that that was out. Kudos to the Slant. It was a pretty effective operation. The lineup itself was pretty interesting, a little bit out of our budget. I thought it was funny that the Melodores were on the same line as Hozier.

In terms of this year, we were like, this is one less thing we want to have to deal with. If you look at major festival lineups, they don’t say anything ’till their release dates, so we tried to emulate more of that approach.

Who are you most excited to see this weekend?

Porter. I came onto the group as sort of an EDM specialist. Each year, we think of who’s graduating and what kind of genre biases we will need to fill. So my year they were looking to fill a more EDM niche and thats how I got into Music Group.

Porter has moved past EDM, which has a different connotation now than back then. He has said that his latest album is more synth pop and I would agree, but it’s amazing to see his evolution as an artist, his performance style. He’s an ambassador for electronic music in that he’s a music artist first and a DJ second.

Do you get to take time to enjoy your hard work or will you spend most of the weekend managing the event?

Everyone who’s on Music Group is working the festival, whether its handling merch, working with tour managers or helping with security in the crowd. It’s definitely more of a management role. There are points where we get to hang and watch the show, but we’re here to work the show and make sure it happens. We’re not going to tailgates before.

What are you most proud of during your time on VPB?

For me, what I’ve really enjoyed is not just evolving in my own music taste, but seeing the other group members evolve over time in what they like to listen to and how they pick that music from other people in the group. It’s a really cool process, seeing someone like myself come in a Swedish House Mafia and Steve Aoki fan, and now I really listen to a lot of alt downtempo and R&B and stuff like that. And it’s cool to see that in other group members too.

Can I use the photos from the Rites of Spring webpage in this article?

Yes.