By Myron Mathis
Columnist

Last year’s Vibe Live performance featured the likes of Rick Ross, Taking Back Sunday, Salt-n-Peppa and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. While the performance was entertaining overall, other students and myself felt the lineup left something to be desired. Granted, a slew of parents and older folk attend the annual Fall Festival concert, it is still imperative to cater to the younger audience. If you’re going to have four acts perform on a college campus, three of them should be relevant to college-aged students with one act for the older crowd. This is why I feel that without a doubt, this year’s lineup for Vibe Live is much more improved over its predecessor.

This year the Hofstra community will have the pleasure of seeing Big Sean, Snoop Dogg, Cobra Starship and KC and the Sunshine Band live. Big Sean continues to release track after track and his debut album “Finally Famous” has been on the Billboard charts for 63 weeks. It is currently number 57 on the best R&B/hip-hop albums chart where it peaked at number two.

Cobra Starship is a rather new and relatively unestablished group, but they are entertaining nonetheless. Perhaps their biggest hit to date is “You Make Me Feel” featuring Sabi. According to Billboard.com the song spent 20 weeks on the Yahoo Audio chart and peaked at number three.
KC and the Sunshine Band is a great choice as on oldie but goodie for those more mature in attendance for the Vibe Live concert. They are of 1970’s fame, most well known for their astronomical hit “That’s The Way I Like It,” released in 1975. The only old school bands that I would really like to see besides these guys are Aerosmith and Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. a.k.a. Snoop Dogg has managed to stay relevant in hip-hop since the early 1990’s. With singles like “Gin and Juice,” “Doggy Style,” “Sensual Seduction,” as well as collaborations like his verse on “California Girls” by Katy Perry and his song with Wiz Khalifa “Young, Wild, & Free.” Snoop Dogg is still very popular among a wide age range of hip-hop aficionados. Recently, he has made a stir in entertainment news with his proclamation that he has renamed himself “Snoop Lion.” It will be very interesting come September 29 to see whether Hofstra will get a taste of the Snoop Dogg we’ve always known, or rather this incarnation of Snoop Lion who intends to release a reggae album as his next project. At the end of the day, I just hope for a good show. In the words of reggae legend Bob Marley, “I’m jammin, I want to be jammin with you.”