In the past, I have bitched about Team 31's choice of band's for WILD, WashU's twice-annual festival of drunkenness and hospital visits. Team 31 maintains that the reason they choose crappy bands is because good bands are too expensive or they can't book far in advance, but thanks to vigilant reader Bob Flynn we can now go past the veneer of lies and find out the truth.

This page details the cost and relative timetable for hiring many of today's top artists (and some old dinosaurs looking to make a quick buck) for a performance. If we were a rich (and stupid) school, we could get Beyonce and her two co-stars du jour in Destiny's Child for a cool 250 grand. If we lived in the south, we could get Shania Twain for a whopping 300 thousand big ones. You, too, can "let the dogs out" for the bargain price of only ten thousand dollars. And Tool, a band whose sound can be most closely approximated by Vanessa's air conditioning unit, runs at "$200K plus".

Some other amusing entries:

-We can bring Arrested Devleopment out of retirement for only $10K
-Hootie costs $20K but add the rest of the Blowfish and you're 50 grand in the hole.
-We can ensure that no one gets drunk at WILD by hiring Gilbert Gottfried for $10 thousand, thereby forcing everyone to leave the quad to escape his grating voice.
-DJs are cheap (which is appropriate since they aren't actually making their own music), there is a whole gaggle of them all for less than $15K.
-Dave Matthews costs over $100,000 but unfortunately he doesn't play colleges. I guess he doesn't like our "no smoking pot on stage" policy.

And here's how Team 31 has misappropriated our funds in the past:
-Crazytown: $40K (for that one damn Butterfly song. Sugar. Baby.) + Saliva: $20K + Stereomud: $10K = Complete Ripoff
-G. Love and Special Sauce: $20-30K (I'm sure we managed to negotiate ourselves the highest possible price)
-Outakst: $75-100K (for 30 minutes of music plus a 30 minute sound and microphone check which the crowd mistakenly thought was a song)
-Eve 6: $20-25K (Interesting, the best band we've had has also been the cheapest)

So I urge all of you to find your favorite band on this list, note that chances are they are much cheaper than Outkast, and flood Team 31 with requests and/or complaints. Only together can we expel bad music from Washington University.