Afterhours: Northeastern University’s Home for Underground Performance

A research project by Caitlyn Furler

For my Musical Communities of Boston class this semester, I conducted ethnomusicological field research at Afterhours, which is Northeastern University’s live music venue located in Starbucks in the Curry Student Center on campus. I chose Afterhours as I felt that it would prove to be a valuable insight into Northeastern’s culture and the broader Boston college culture. To provide some context, I am an exchange student from Australia doing a study abroad program for one semester at Northeastern. When I first began this project, I had only been living in the US for about two weeks and had been exposed to the American college culture and Northeastern’s culture for about one week. With this being my background, I was primarily an outsider throughout my research experiences.

In addition to wanting to experience a college culture environment, I also wanted the opportunity to observe the grassroots, local aspect of the music culture in Boston. Through ethnic and cultural diversity and the presence of a dense student population, the greater Boston area has had a reputation for facilitating the organic growth of a wide range of music genres and scenes. From the 1960s folk revival in small, intimate venues such as Café 47 in Cambridge, to the underground rock movements of the 1970s, to the present day indie scene in Allston, the presence of many universities has fostered active student participation in musical communities around Boston. I wanted to see if this aspect of Boston’s reputation is evident in a microcosmic way at Northeastern.

The methods for my fieldwork research at Afterhours were simple: I attended events at Afterhours on an average of once a week, observed audience interactions, conducted interviews and followed the related organizations on social media pages.  The primary question I wanted to explore through this research is whether Afterhours, as a college venue, has its own musical community ‘ecosystem’ and whether this environment is creating opportunity for an emerging music scene at Northeastern to flourish.

The events I attended at Afterhours during the first month of my research provided me with an idea of the overall scope of events that occur at the venue. The first event I attended was hosted by a student run organization called Green Line Records and featured outside musical artists: Honey Cutt, Ava Luna and Men I Trust. The second event I attended was an open mic night hosted by another student organization called LMA (Live Music Association). The third was a student showcase fundraiser hosted by NU Barkada, a club for Filipino students. The fourth was a performance from another outside musician, Will Dailey, hosted by the Afterhours venue itself.

I knew of LMA (Live Music Association) through my background research about organizations related to Afterhours and through attending one of the open mic performances they hosted in January. I reached out to LMA and organized an interview with their President, Sam Laureano, and their Vice President, Kevin Hassenfratz. I met with them before one of the events that LMA & CUP (Council for University Programs) hosted at Afterhours featuring well-known outside artist, Still Woozy. My meeting with them helped to put many of my initial observations about Afterhours into context. Sam and Kevin were wonderful to talk to about Afterhours. They were clearly very invested in the events the run at Afterhours and passionate about facilitating space for student performers to showcase their talents and songwriting.

Prompted by my initial findings, I asked the members of LMA if they felt like students in general at Northeastern were informed of all the events happening at Afterhours:

Sam: Hmm. Good question. I feel like people know that things happen in Afterhours but they don’t know where to look for like what’s happening tonight, other than just walking in. There’s been some efforts on campus for people to like build apps that talk about all the events but then like they only contact certain clubs and then the other half of, this app contacts the other half the clubs and like it’s kind of very inconsistent… Just email doesn’t really work anymore. No one looks at posters. And posting around campus is also like you’re competing with people like the Sony college reps are putting all the like sponsored posters up and I guess kind of just like you’re fighting for space. (Personal Interview, 21 February 2019)

The other aspect of my interview with LMA that I found quite surprising, as an outsider to US colleges, was that student organizations who run events at Afterhours have a budget of up to $12,000 to book artists, per show. This money is taken from the Northeastern’s Student Activity Fund, which each student contributes to through their tuition amount. The money is dispersed to the student clubs on campus after they have submitted their plans for events and the budgets for those events. For a club like LMA, they would figure out how many dates they would want to reserve the Afterhours space for and how much money they would need to book the artists they want to host. Securing the Afterhours space can apparently be competitive sometimes due to the vast number of student clubs. While the resources are available for these events, getting the information about the events to the students is evidently another matter that is sometimes unsuccessful.

My fieldwork illustrated to me that Afterhours has some limitations in terms of its reach to the student population of Northeastern. However, I understood that this does not necessarily eliminate its potential to be a site for a musical community or ecosystem. Perhaps the Afterhours space would just service a smaller percentage of the student population, like the freshman who live on campus and most frequently attend Afterhours, or the students who perform at the venue. This became the next aspect of the Afterhours community that I focused on.

Through talking with Sam and Kevin from LMA, I heard about how their club helps to facilitate student performance at Afterhours through events like regular open mic nights and student showcases. And, as they said themselves, they are just one of the clubs running those sorts of programs.

Through the open mic nights, student showcases and songwriter nights I attended at Afterhours, it became clear to me that students felt comfortable in the Afterhours space to explore their musicality, songwriting and talents. Many students performed for the first time or performed new songs they had just written for the first time. Even one of the outside artists I spoke to, Will Dailey, commented that he loved performing at Afterhours because it was a safe, low pressure venue to try new songs and see how they go. One of the showcases I went to was a fundraiser and as each student got up on stage to perform, there was cheering and clapping from the very engaged crowd of fellow students. There was such a contagious and encouraging atmosphere of excitement for each performer.

I saw students perform a wide variety of genres and styles ranging from hip hop, R&B and rap to folk, to spoken word, to electronic soundtrack style pieces. Some performances were polished and professional and others were clearly from amateur performers. However, even so, the general atmosphere of the space and the reception from the audience was supportive towards both sides of the spectrum. As stated in the Music Educators Journal, musical engagement is fostered when students are treated as unique individuals (Hendricks 2014: 36). The full spectrum of performances was facilitated by events like the LMA open mic. I saw the benefit that had on those involved, it allowed them an opportunity to showcase their talent in the way they individually engage with music. Some students performed pieces with very personal stories related to their relationships, mental health, and ethnic heritage. One powerful illustration of the encouraging, safe environment was a male student who got up on stage and announced to the crowd that he would be rapping, but that he hadn’t rapped it himself before. He usually just produced the tracks for his friends to rap to. At first, he was hesitant. But with each song he performed and each moment of clapping or encouragement from the crowd, his confidence visibly increased, illustrated through his body language becoming more comfortable. He began to move around the stage a little bit more and immerse himself in the performance.

As stated earlier, the audience at Afterhours sometimes doesn’t engage with the performances because people have headphones in and are on their laptops to study. Even this aspect of the space added to the safe environment feeling of Afterhours. During some of the events I attended, it was like the performers were busking in the subway or street with people walking by, eating, drinking, talking and not really engaging with the performance. Being a performer myself, I know that performing in a space where people aren’t paying attention isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It provides an environment for beginners to get comfortable playing in front of other people in general, without the pressure of those people actively listening or participating.

Overall, through my field research at Afterhours, I observed that it is a multi-faceted community space that does not serve a single audience or group. Primarily, it services the student run organizations that utilize it as a venue or meeting space. From there, the community extends to those involved with those clubs. Those involved directly would be the members of the clubs, professional artists, student performers. And then the circle extends to those indirectly connected like audiences that are brought to the venue either actively through seeing the event advertised online or through word of mouth or passively through entering the venue to go to Starbucks or study. These extending circles of connection to the venue make the space quite complex. However, even with the complex nature, I could see that those immediately connected to the space (through clubs and performing) are part of the Afterhours musical community. This Afterhours musical community has traits of Boston’s reputation for grassroots, organically formed music scenes. Perhaps most tellingly through the fact that these performances are somewhat underground and not known to the entire Northeastern population. They are something that must be sought out by students who are interested. And secondly, the performances at the venue are organic. They are not overly polished or commercialized, especially the student performances. The students perform original works that are unique to them, their experiences and their heritage. Even though these performances differ drastically in their stylistic contexts, they illustrate the students of Northeastern and therefore reflect aspects of Northeastern’s culture. I would dare to say that, although complicated, Afterhours does provide a home for a music scene that is unique to Northeastern’s student population.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Sam Laureano and Kevin Hassenfratz from Northeastern’s Live Music Association (LMA) for their willingness to be interviewed.

Endnotes

Goodman, Fred. The Mansion on the Hill. New York, Random House, 1997.

Hendricks, Karin S, et al. “Creating Safe Spaces for Music Learning.” Music Educators Journal, vol. 101, no. 1, 2014, pp. 35–40.