dept of.

As we all know, the LDOC concert last night was too lit, with Daya, Peach Tree Rascals, and most importantly, A$AP Ferg, taking the stage on Abele Quad and throwing the first in-person concert at Duke in 3 years. But was it potentially too lit? The independent party organization All The Thrills (think Michelin awarding the Michelin Star, but for concerts) deemed LDOC 2022 to be one of the “most enthralling events of the decade” and “a sprint into absolute litness,” despite everything student union said about LDOC being a marathon, not a sprint. “The daytime activities were also cool too.”

The concert itself began around 7PM with many students returning home from lab and ready to celebrate together with their fellow friends and random classmates they didn’t know could get lit with at a concert. As the crowd began singing along to Daya and Peach Tree Rascals, the crowd felt vibrant and energized as they let go of all the stress they accumulated over the semester. One observer described the energy of the crowd as “a crisp drink of White Claw.” They also just finished drinking 5 out of the 6 permitted BYO White Claws snuck in via plastic bag. But then the headliner A$AP Ferg took the stage and the crowd erupted in excitement and lost themselves in the trap music.

At one point, the crowd reached peak litness and started singing along in autotune to A$AP Ferg’s album “Still Striving.” Some students began reaching their throats in confusion to what happened to their vocal chords before Ferg played his hit single “Plain Jane” and the crowd went back to mobbing like there was no tomorrow. “See, when the crowd gets into autotune, you know you’ve succeeded as a performer,” All The Thrills writes. “You’ve tuned into their student’s inner energy and turned it into music. Our rreporters have only seen this happen twice at Duke in our 50 years of covering student concerts, the first one of course being the Kanye West LDOC ’04 concert.”

As such, All the Thrills awarded Duke University Union(DUU) the “Unforgettable Night Award”, reserved for only the “most lit of nights,” for its exceptional artist quality, crowd energy, and fun-filled atmosphere. For the seniors that didn’t have an in-person LDOC since May 2019, it was an ultimate fulfillment of all their dreams: to finally vibe to music with their friends in a concert away from their parents. Juniors are already pressuring DUU to keep raising the bar for next year, with one junior saying “If next year’s LDOC isn’t as lit as this, then I’m not graduating.” It was a concert to die for, and that says a lot, given I went to the Travis Scott concert.

Well, if you’re just like me and wondering where your time and 300,000+$ (non-refundable) to Duke University went, it’s probably time for you to graduate and get out of this lovely, beautiful, soul-sucking institution. We know that COVID robbed us seniors of the lovely 1.2 years we could have spent watching Netflix in our luxurious classrooms instead of at each of our parents’ house, but we still had the chance to make many good memories, like getting drunk at that one frat house and being Ubered back or learning all of physics in one night of hyperstudying. As you revisit your memories (and the parts you’d want to burn in the bonfire that didn’t happen), don’t forget to complete these important items for your special graduation day!

• Add Mary Barra on LinkedIn and get her to add you- Listen, I’m fucking mad that she’s our graduation speaker this year too, but if she (hypothetically) hooked me up with a job at GM and/or one of the electric vehicles, then I’d respect her for life.
• Burn all of your notes – Unless you’re studying for MCAT, LSAT, or whatever bullshit acronym someone made to mean “hard long test,” you don’t need these notes. Start clean. Engulf your notes in flames. And may the things you’re actually going to use from here arise from the ashes like a phoenix. Like how to write a grant proposal. Or how to update your resume for your job. Basically anything related to begging people for money.
• Create a memento of your time at Duke – for me, I’m taking my Pitchforks receipts I kept lying around and assembling them to look like President Price’s million-dollar face.
• Dine at the Nasher – and pretend you’re a fancy businessperson as you order things that are way outside of your food point budget. Risotto du Jour? Yes please.
• Embrace your friends – have one last hurrah! It’ll be the last time you get to fool around with them before the grasps of adulthood take hold of your body and they become mere contacts on your phone.
• Follow all your friends on insta – so you can see the wonderful places they’re going after graduation like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and of course, San Francisco!
• Give an awkward tour of campus to your family – as your family members ooh and ahh over the grandiose Duke Chapel, the lush Duke Gardens, the spacious Perkins and Bostock libraries, and the glass edifice (you could throw a rock at it) of the Wilkinson Building, you’ll be wondering what they find so compelling about these buildings you got tired of after 2 months of being here.