Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (2 page)

A cappella continued to assault pop music. In 1991, Boyz II Men had a number-one hit with “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.” That same year, Spike Lee produced a documentary for PBS called
Do It A Cappella
, which introduced the world to five very white guys called Rockapella, who would soon land a gig as the house band on the PBS kiddie show
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
, introducing a whole new generation to a cappella music. (The show was not entirely altruistic, for the record. Up in the control room, employees would bet on which kid would win, says Sean Altman, then the lead singer of Rockapella.) In 2004, Toxic Audio started an open-ended run off-Broadway at the John Houseman Theater.

Which doesn’t really explain how a cappella became one of the most celebrated pursuits on our nation’s college campuses.

There are more than twelve hundred collegiate a cappella groups in the United States alone. And the good ones, well, it’s not what you think. A cappella has come a long way in the one hundred years since it evolved from glee clubs into a tradition that is hugely popular (some eighteen thousand active participants) , considerably profitable (the Harvard Krokodiloes earn, conservatively, three hundred thousand dollars a year, which funds the group’s adventures), and much publicized (a cappella groups have appeared on the
Late Show with David Letterman
). It’s not what you think. Today the music is less barbershop than
Barbershop 2: Back in Business
.

The gold standard remains the original, the Yale Whiffenpoofs—the very first collegiate a cappella group, founded in 1909 after a drunken night of singing at Mory’s, a New Haven supper club. Nearly one hundred years later, the Whiffs still perform there every Monday night. And their influence has been felt well outside of New Haven. The group’s signature tune, “The Whiffenpoof Song” (the name comes from a mythical fish), was later covered by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Senator Prescott Bush—President George W. Bush’s grandfather—was a member of the Whiffenpoofs. So was Cole Porter. Over the years, the Whiffs have traveled the world, entertaining the likes of Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. The Whiffs have even performed on
Saturday Night Live.
(The producers ran each kid’s SAT scores across the bottom of the screen in a CNN-style crawl.) A recent addition to their clip reel: In late 2002, Aaron Sorkin—a big Whiffs fan since childhood—flew the entire group out to Los Angeles to tape a Christmas episode of
The West Wing
, where members of the Whiffs report Sorkin was jumping around the set yelling,
“I can’t believe the fucking Whiffenpoofs are here.”

The Whiffs aren’t the only a cappella group at Yale. Actually, there are now at least fifteen on campus. One, the Baker’s Dozen, is known around New Haven as “the drinking group with a singing problem.” The BDs briefly eclipsed the Whiffenpoofs in name recognition when, on New Year’s Eve 2007, they were assaulted outside a party in San Francisco—a story that made international news. The
San Francisco Chronicle
ran this headline: “New Year’s Nightmare for Visiting Yale Singers.” The
New York Post
followed with the cheeky: “Yale Songbirds Are Pummeled.”

Collegiate a cappella had been strictly a guy thing until, in 1936, the first all-female collegiate group was born at Smith College. They called themselves the Smiffenpoofs—perhaps the birth of a cappella’s notorious obsession with puns. (The most egregious pun in all of a cappella may be the Harvard Law School group, Habeas Chorus. Their motto: “Because justice is blind, not deaf.”) The first coed group was founded in 1973 at Princeton. They’re called the Katzenjammers—which is German for both “a loud, discordant noise” and (perhaps more apt) a “hangover.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a thing about a cappella—the snapping, the matching khaki pants—that your typical college kid would suggest is cool. Especially not the human beatbox, that guy (or girl) imitating a snare drum and a bass with a
sh-sh-k-ts-sh -sh-k-ts
. Even in the late 1930s, the Whiffenpoofs were already considered to be uncool. So uncool, in fact, that a rival singing group, Yale’s Society of Orpheus and Bacchus (the SOBs), was started with the express purpose of mocking the Whiffs. And cool is nothing if not relative. On campus—though it’s crass to say— a cappella will get you laid. “At Duke, it’s not as cool as being on the basketball team,” says one of the Duke University Pitchforks, the university’s celebrated all-male a cappella group. “But it’s close.”

A cappella is the kind of frenzied subculture that over four years—just like a fraternity—might make your name on campus. But you will spend the rest of your life denying it. “A cappella,” sighs James Van Der Beek, the onetime star of
Dawson’s Creek
and Drew University’s 36 Madison Avenue. “I thought it might catch up with me.”

Even before his TV career took off, Van Der Beek was a big man on campus. He tells a story about the time this girl heard him perform Sting’s “Englishman in New York,” and invited him to hand-deliver a copy of the group’s CD to her dorm room. Madison Avenue frequently took road trips. Van Der Beek recalls a memorable tour of SUNY Binghamton. Due to extenuating circumstances too difficult to explain here (something about the number of cars and available seats), one member of his a cappella group needed to spend a second night at Binghamton, hitching a ride back to Drew University the next morning. That man, the group decided, should be James Van Der Beek. Why? “Because, of all the guys in the group,” he says, laughing, “they felt like I’d have the best chance of finding a place to sleep that night.” And he did.

Mira Sorvino, Diane Sawyer, Art Garfunkel, Jim Croce, Anne Hathaway of
The Devil Wears Prada
,
Prison Break
’s Wentworth Miller, actress Rashida Jones (Quincy Jones’s daughter),
The O.C.
’s Peter Gallagher—they all got their start in collegiate a cappella.

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 brother
ship
,” 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 nontraditional 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.