Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  Full disclosure: Osama bin Laden sang in an a cappella group. Lawrence Wright, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, writes of bin Laden’s teenage years and the man’s “desire to die anonymously in a trench in warfare”—to be just one of the guys. “It was difficult to hold on to this self-conception while being chauffeured around the kingdom in the family Mercedes, ” he writes. “At the same time, Osama made an effort not to be too much of a prig. Although he was opposed to the playing of musical instruments, he organized some of his friends into an a cappella singing group. They even recorded some of their tunes about jihad, which for them meant the internal struggle to improve themselves, not holy war. Osama would make copies and give them each a tape.”

  Not everyone could be so lucky. Debra Messing was rejected by an all-girl group at Brandeis. Worse, Jessica Biel was dismissed by Tufts University’s coed a cappella group, the Amalgamates. It’s shocking (or maybe not) how seriously these groups take themselves—that they’d turn down a Hollywood starlet like Biel. How bad could she have been? Still, it begs the question: In collegiate a cappella, where does the line fall between serious pursuit and goofy joke? It’s blurrier than one would think.

  After school—but before winning Grammys—John Legend went to work for the Boston Consulting Group. But it didn’t take, and he quit to concentrate on his music full-time. Some a cappella alums wind up on MTV. But most never sing again—at least not professionally. In the summer of 2007, John’s friend Denise Sandole sang a Gloria Gaynor song at a friend’s wedding.

  These days, Denise rarely listens to the old Counterparts albums—though they were very well received at the time. (“One of Us,” which appeared on their disc Housekeeping, was selected for the Best of College A Cappella series in 1998, which is sort of like the Now That’s What I Call Music! series for collegiate a cappella.) Alums from the Counterparts, the ones in New York anyway, get together now and again for a night of karaoke. Still, even they are far from a cappella apologists, winking at the very thing that brought them together. “At karaoke, no one sings old Counterparts songs,” says Denise, now a thirty-year-old grad student in psychology at Yeshiva University. “That’s an unspoken rule. Though we love to reminisce.” But what is it that drives people to such great lengths to excel at something they may spend the rest of their lives denying?

  Perhaps they are smart to deny it. Because a cappella has become a go-to pop culture joke. In the 2006 season premiere of NBC’s The Office, one of the characters (played by Daily Show vet Ed Helms) bragged about singing in an a cappella group at Cornell called Here Comes Treble. A cappella would become a long-running joke on the show, reaching fever pitch when Helms serenaded a co-worker in 2007 with ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me”—backed by his old a cappella group on speakerphone. (The group sang, “Take a chance, take a chance, take a chance,” beneath his solo.) A cappella popped up elsewhere on NBC on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, and even on Broadway in 2007 in Young Frankenstein , with a Whiffenpoof joke. In the movie The Break-Up, Jennifer Aniston’s brother sang in an a cappella group called the Tone Rangers, which was played for laughs. The film’s co-writer, Jay Lavender, had firsthand knowledge of collegiate a cappella. As a student at Holy Cross, his sister started a coed group, 8-Track. Jay calls a cappella a “subculture,” which is how outsiders generally refer to a small group of people doing something they find unintentionally hilarious. He still laughs thinking about the time his sister berated the members of 8-Track for going flat, shouting, “Quarter tones matter, people!” These stories are comedy gold, Jay says. A joke on The Office is one thing, but even the Ivy League brats who inherited the a cappella legacy may be turning on their own. In 1995, some Yale students led an organized revolt against the a cappella scene; on tap night, as new members were being selected, water balloons rained down, blotting out the moon. (The university has since taken steps to control tap night, in part keeping the date a secret.) More recently, in 2007, the snarky blog IvyGate sponsored a contest to find the Worst A Cappella Group in the Ivy League.

  So where does the impulse to step out in front of a group of identically dressed men and hum into a microphone before a crowd of thousands come from? What is the appeal of the human beatbox to screaming fans of bestirred coeds who seem to lose their senses at the unaccompanied rendition of Hootie & the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand?” And what of the crisis some face after graduation, suffering from the hangover of so much adulation?

  “Why a cappella?” or maybe more specifically, “Why not?”

  Masi Oka is the breakout star of NBC’s Heroes. He plays fan favorite Hiro Nakamura, a man who can bend time. If Masi Oka really could go back in time, he might rethink his undergraduate wardrobe. There he was in 1997, the music director of Bear Necessities, an all-male a cappella group at Brown University, onstage at Solomon Hall on the Green. Bear Necessities is not the only all-male a cappella group at Brown, but only the members of Bear Necessities dress exclusively in suspenders. It gets worse. One year, Masi Oka arranged an a cappella version of “Flashdance” and he came out onstage wearing a purple leotard and a tutu. In his defense, the entire group was supposed to wear tutus. “They chickened out and wore leg warmers and bandannas,” he says. “But I thought we had to go all-out. A cappella is all about commitment.”

  Being a member of Bear Necessities was a formative experience for Masi Oka. A self-described math and science geek, he’d grown up on the West Coast, and he’d noticed something about his friends—the ones who’d gone off to Harvard and MIT. “They started talking the same,” he says, “thinking the same, laughing the same, smelling the same. But undergrad is an opportunity for social growth.” Masi Oka (who’d been featured on the cover of Time magazine as a twelve-year-old for a story called “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids”) was himself accepted to Harvard and MIT. He’s glad he turned them down. “I would have been comfortable in my math and science world at Harvard,” he says. “I wouldn’t have even thought about trying out for a cappella.”

  Looking back on his time singing in the Bear Necessities, he describes the group as a “geeky frat.” “It was a brothership,” he says, inventing a word that in the end perfectly captures the experience, an experience that never really left him. In 2006, after Heroes hit and Masi was nominated for a Golden Globe, he caught wind of a Ben Stiller movie that was about to go into production, a movie called The Marc Pease Experience—about the world of high-school musical theater (it was close enough). He was desperate for an audition. No dice. “My agent told me they were only seeing white people,” he says.

  Collegiate a cappella is, of course, much more than some alternative to the Greek scene. Though not everybody has such a rewarding experience. Ed Helms doesn’t just play an a cappella singer in The Office. In 1993, as an undergraduate at Oberlin, he was a member of the Oberlin Obertones—for exactly one semester. The boys wore tuxedos, exclusively. “There was no fucking around with jeans and ties,” Helms says. Though the Obertones were the closest thing on campus to a fraternity and were showered with the requisite female affection, “the group was so pretentious it made me nauseous,” Helms says. Especially the leadership. The Obertones’ music director was a fifth-year who’d stayed in school just to direct the group. Helms had to quit when this kid said, “I love singing. But what I really love is kicking other a cappella groups’ asses.” Helms just couldn’t deal with the personalities anymore. “I decided pot was more important than extracurricular activities,” he says.

  In many cases a cappella is more than an extracurricular activity. Peter Bailey runs Industrial Artist Management, a talent firm in Manhattan that represents acts like Anti-Gravity (who performed with P. Diddy at the MTV VMAs one year) in the corporate space. He is also an alum of the Harvard Krokodiloes. (By the way, leave it to Harvard to come up with a double-blind system of auditions for a cappella.) When he heard the Kroks were still charging a couple thousand dollars for a gig, he pushed them to up their fees. Being in the business of booking nontrad
itional talent, he was well aware of what the Kroks could charge. “They were undervaluing themselves,” he says. (Bailey briefly considered adding the Kroks to IAM’s talent roster, but with exams, holidays, and turnover, they’re not an ideal client.) When Bailey graduated in the nineties, leaving the group behind, they were making three hundred thousand dollars—on a slow year. Every summer the Kroks embark on a world tour, and in his day, Bailey traveled to more than fifteen countries with the Kroks, staying in European castles and Mexican resorts—mining relationships established decades ago. Some complain that groups like the Kroks and the Whiffenpoofs are born on third base—if not home. But you can’t argue with the work ethic. Very few Kroks sing all four years. “The time commitment is killer,” Bailey says.

  A cappella groups have tremendous self-pride, playing up their differences in dress, musical style, and personality—much like a fraternity would. At the University of Virginia, the Hullabahoos perform in brightly colored robes. Their rivals, the Academical Village People, perform in gas-station-attendant shirts. That a cappella groups are similarly self-selecting and heterogeneous says as much about race relations on campus as a study of the Greek system.

  But there are generalizations to be made: Collegiate a cappella groups are largely student-run, operating outside the often staid domain of university music programs. While some employ choreography, most just stand in a horseshoe—emulating guitars with a well-placed jeer neer. And almost every group has, at some point, featured A-Ha’s “Take on Me” in their repertoire. (The eighties were seminal for collegiate a cappella.) While professional a cappella groups like the House Jacks remain small—most pro groups have just five or six members—collegiate groups are made up of between nine and fifteen students. A cappella groups are easy to spot on campus, where they are known to invade the archways, serenading comely women. There is another generalization to be made: These groups make money, and, in some cases, lots of money. For a gig at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the UVA Hullabahoos were paid thirteen thousand dollars.

  Still, a cappella is the vestige of college life that dare not speak its name. There is no shame, no real social stigma, in admitting you were a Sigma Chi. You might discuss it on a first date. You might even put it on a résumé. A cappella, however, is topic non grata. It reeks of that Folgers commercial.

  But collegiate a cappella includes the drama kids and the jocks; it drives young women crazy, and some young men to violence. A cappella is a choice college students make, a choice to stand up and sing, to perform, to compete, to serenade, to profit, to hide, to seek truth, to find answers, and to commemorate. The experience is more surreal—more rewarding, more visceral—than one could imagine. And, as it turns out, painfully hard to give up. For every kid who can walk away at graduation, there are others destined to live in the past, wishing they were still up onstage snapping (likely to something by Journey). You can’t really blame them. After all, no one applauds you for showing up to the Monday-morning meeting at Goldman Sachs.

  For answers—for some deeper understanding of this subculture (there’s that word again!)—we turn to three collegiate a cappella groups in the 2006-2007 school year, each at a crossroads. Divisi, an all-female group from the University of Oregon, had been the heavy favorites to win at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in 2005. But after a crippling loss in the finals, they took a year off to regroup. Now, back in competition with a near all-new roster of girls, could they return to the ICCAs and avenge their good name?

  Elsewhere, the legendary Tufts Beelzebubs were founded in 1962, and they’d always been at the forefront of a cappella recording. But their 2003 album, Code Red, was a complete game-changer. In a cappella circles, people talk strictly in terms of before Code Red and after Code Red. Now the Bubs were back in the studio and the pressure was suffocating. Would this be just another album, or could they raise the bar again? In short: What do you do for an encore? And is forty years of history a blessing or a curse?

  Finally, the University of Virginia’s own Hullabahoos may be the upstart bad boys of collegiate a cappella—breaking hearts along the eastern seaboard. As they approached their twentieth anniversary, a question arose: Could they establish themselves as a top-tier group like the Beelzebubs without sacrificing their laid-back soul? And did they even want to?

  The curious, inspiring, triumphant, hilarious, and heartbreaking story of the quest for collegiate a cappella glory begins onstage at Lincoln Center.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DIVISI

  Wherein twelve ladies in red ties are snubbed at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella —and contemplate returning for seconds

  Evynne Smith stands onstage at Manhattan’s Alice Tully Hall, the stately theater that regularly plays home to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the province of aging subscribers and PBS tote bags. Tonight, the scene is a little bit different.

  It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as “sexy stewardess.” Their red lipstick (the kind, perhaps, favored by off-duty stewardesses) goes on like paint. These twelve women— perhaps refugees from some Olive Garden training center—hail from the University of Oregon. They’re called Divisi (pronounced dih-VEE-see) and they are among the nation’s most celebrated collegiate a cappella groups. Laugh if you must. But tonight’s concert is standing-room only. All eleven hundred tickets sold out weeks ago—at fifty dollars a pop. Still, a few people mill about outside the venue, hoping to snag a last-minute pass. Yes, it is an a cappella show, and people are trying to scalp tickets. One man holds up a homemade sign, scrawled in red marker, that reads: MY SON IS PERFORMING TONIGHT. GOT AN EXTRA? He’s lucky. A twentysomething girl hesitates before selling her ticket to this desperate man—for a whopping two hundred and fifty dollars. “I’m, like, an a cappella fan,” she says, hesitating. “But my rent is due on Monday and I could totally use the cash.”

  It’s a tough crowd, what with the a cappella-erati in the house—including everyone from professionals like Rockapella’s Barry Carl to Deke Sharon, a Tufts University alum commonly referred to as the father of contemporary a cappella. Divisi is the final group to perform that night. And while the order was drawn entirely at random, it is also fitting. Ask anyone in the audience to pinpoint the exact moment Divisi won the hearts and minds of the crowd, and they will likely say the same thing: somewhere around minute eight and a half of the group’s twelve-minute, three-song set. The girls had already performed “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox and Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”—two well-executed, if highly predictable, endeavors. (Only Sarah McLachlan would have been more obvious.) But what came next was anything but expected.

  The girls from Divisi stand in three rows, their heads bowed to the ground. Divisi’s music director, a tiny whip of a thing named Lisa Forkish, blows the starting pitch, counting off two-three -four. And then it happens. The girls sing, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”—a total of seven times, building in intensity each time, eventually sustaining a G minor-9 chord. A ripple of recognition rolls through the younger members of tonight’s crowd, who, in near unison, sit up at attention.

  The syllables go something like this: Bee REE // bee REE // bee REE // bee REE. Katie Hopkins steps to the mic, singing, “Up in the club with my homey // trying to get a little ...” Onstage at Lincoln Center, a female a cappella group (all white, by the way, not that there’s anything wrong with that) will make Usher’s signature track, “Yeah,” their own. Two minutes in, Evynne Smith steps out, grabs the mic, and unapologetically raps: “Watch out // My outfit’s ridiculous! // Looking so conspicuous! // These women are on the prowl // Try to sing against us had to throw ’em the towel.” Like Usher, Evynne Smith will not stop until she sees you in your birthday suit. She closes the rap with this bit of improv: “You know you want a kiss when the lips so red!”

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nbsp; The crowd is on their feet. A middle-aged man in the audience holds a cardboard sign way above his head. It reads HOT LIPS!, which would be inappropriate in any other context. Right, context.

  Evynne Smith and the ladies of Divisi (they call themselves Divisi Divas) are competing in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. The hard-core a cappella fans refer to this event as the ICK-ahs, though the rest just spell it out, as in the I-C-C-As. The competition—sort of like the a cappella Rose Bowl—began in 1995 but has quickly grown to include groups from as far as Canada, Western Europe, and, most recently, Asia. The whole thing is produced by an organization called Varsity Vocals, a five-person operation run out of (in part) a strip-mall storefront in Maine. Ignore the skeleton crew: The impact of the ICCAs is enormous. While the winning team will leave Lincoln Center with one thousand dollars in prize money (plus recording time), the competition is really about bragging rights. In the same way that winning an Oscar can bump an actor to the A-list, a win at the ICCAs can lead to bigger-paying gigs, a spike in album sales, and (perhaps most importantly) more friend requests for the group’s MySpace page. It’s no surprise that the backstage drama at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella plays out like the unintentionally hilarious scrum of a children’s beauty pageant.

  For Evynne Smith and Divisi, the road to the ICCA finals has been paved with blood, sweat, and runny mascara.

  Evynne Smith grew up in Eugene, down the road from the University of Oregon—once home to legendary track star Steve Prefontaine. Not that athletics was a draw for Evynne. She chose the school because it was close to home, and because it was affordable. It didn’t hurt that her high school sweetheart would enroll there too. Walking the halls of the music building one afternoon, Evynne—tall, blond, pretty—saw a flyer for a new a cappella group, Eight Ladies and a Beau Tie. She was intrigued. She went to the audition. She sang the national anthem. And while she could wail, the truth is, even if she couldn’t sing a lick, they probably would have taken her. The girls had a Beau Tie (a kid named Mike Peterson, their beatbox for hire) but not yet the titular Eight Ladies. Worse: Their Beau Tie was known around campus for another of his extracurricular activities. “He was the guy on the unicycle,” says Peter Hollens, founder of the University of Oregon’s all-male a cappella group, On the Rocks. It seems like every campus has one.