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Frosh Weak
As orientation weeks get ready to overwhelm Toronto’s many post-secondary institutions, there is one question more important than the hemming and hawing over academics, new friends, and leaving home: who will have the best Frosh Week concert?
This year’s race is as stacked as ever: U of T gets Tokyo Police Club, Cadence Weapon, and Basia Bulat on Friday, September 5 on their Back Campus; York gets Stars (U of T’s leftovers), Sweet Thing, Ruby Coast, Trainlight, and DJ Knox on Tuesday, September 16 at the Rexall Centre; Ryerson gets Kardinal Offishall, Thunderheist, Zaki Ibrahim, and Team Canada DJs on Toronto Island on Friday, September 5; Humber somehow gets K-OS and the unspeakably good Girl Talk at their North Campus Amphitheatre on Wednesday, September 10; and OCAD got, uh, “an incredible night of talent, with a line-up of 7 bands and artists from OCAD and Toronto” in…their auditorium on Thursday, September 4.
Most of the concerts are in remote or enclosed venues and are restricted to students with proper ID, and as a result will be all but impossible to get into unless you attend (or maybe attended?) the respective schools. But maybe you’re thinking, “hey, isn’t U of T’s concert always really easy to go see, whether you’re a student or not, because it’s just in a big open field in the middle of campus? You know, Back Campus, by Devonshire Place and Hoskin Avenue?” Don’t even!
See, after we published a preview article for last year’s concerts, and initially mentioned that the U of T gig wasn’t exactly taking place in Fort Knox, the University of Toronto’s Students’ Union‘s general manager Rick Telfer got all huffy and repeatedly threatened to take legal action against Torontoist, even after we removed the parts of the article he didn’t like. (Awkward! Especially since I’m a U of T undergraduate and was an Orientation Leader in 2007 and 2006; you’d think that students’ unions would have better things to do than threatening students who are helping with their own orientation weeks.)
Anyway, this year, we won’t say that the U of T concert—which we’ll remind you all of in that Friday’s Urban Planner—will be easy to sneak into, as it was last year and all years before that, just because it’s taking place in a big open field in downtown Toronto that is in no way physically barred to non–U of T students. Our lips are sealed!
Photo of the crowd from 2006’s U of T concert by David Topping.