While much media hoopla has been made over Rivers Cuomo’s time at Harvard last semester, many other, significantly younger, undergraduates have their own visions of rock stardom. Most of these dreams fade well before graduation, as consulting jobs and graduate school applications loom, and electric guitars and drum sets gather dust, waiting for their demotion to keepsakes mounted ironically on Brooklyn loft walls.

But some hardy souls look past the post-coital glow of Wall Street compensation packages and LSATs. Call them crazy. Call them naïve. Just don’t call them late…to rock.

If one thing is clear from the following profiles of alumni bands, it’s that there is no one archetypal “Harvard sound.” It is hardly surprising. The breadth of undergraduate musical interests on campus manifests itself in as many genres as there are bands on campus.

With alumni bands ranging from hip-hop crews with live instruments to folk rock ensembles, to Argentinean polka-fusion beatboxers (okay, that last one probably doesn’t exist...yet), Harvard alums seem stubbornly resistant to futile pigeonholing attempts.

Another layer of diversity can be seen in the varied stances these artists take towards the commercial aspects of their work. Some Harvard students make it their main life goal to get signed to a major label and tour the world, straight-up maxxin’ in stretch Hummers pouring Cris from their wrists.

Others are perfectly content to spend their artistic careers making 7” records in sets of 500 for a die-hard audience, or playing shows only in small groups of friends in a relatively small scene.

Many of the groups profiled here are wholly or partly recreational activities for their members, most of whom have day jobs. Some of them well on their way towards mainstream recognition, some are underground legends, some are defunct by this point, and others might as well be.

So if you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to TRL ubiquity or underground notoriety, look elsewhere (and be prepared to look forever). That’s not to say that nothing can be learned from these musical narratives.

Instead, what emerges from the variety of stories assembled here is that the most important step towards achieving fame and/or fortune in the music business is realizing that there is no one most important step. And that’s a real-life paradox that they won’t teach you about in Moral Reasoning cores.

—Will B. Payne

Lucky Dragons

Lucky Dragons is the primary musical project of Luke Fischbeck ’00, a former DJ for WHRB’s Record Hospital.

Now a student at Brown’s Electronic Music graduate program, Fischbeck has toured across the country as the Lucky Dragons, collaborating with diverse artists to create a special form of organic glitchcore.

A collage of found sounds, spoken work, melodic noise, folk songs, and “beautytronics,” Lucky Dragons’ music can be found on a variety of limited-press 7”s, CDs distributed by “reverse shoplifting,” and numerous compilations.

The music, like the band, is small, personal, and tender—to give you an idea of how shows go, at a recent performance in WHRB’s studios, Luke had set up his laptop with a series of electrodes that he gave to different members of the audience, so that the small group of people could in effect “play each other,” music generated and shaped by the different combinations of body electricity