CUAB hosting Travis Porter, Spike Lee near LDOC

A concert by hip-hop group Travis Porter, hosted by the Carolina Union Activities Board, will be on this semester’s last day of classes.

But it’s not an LDOC event, said Cierra Hinton, president of CUAB.

“We don’t want to call it ‘LDOC,’ because then you get into the question of who does LDOC better,” she said.

Travis Porter’s performance, which is contracted for $14,000, will be on Dec. 7 — the day after film director Spike Lee will visit campus as a CUAB-sponsored speaker.

Lee is contracted for $25,000, and student tickets are $5.

Hinton said that the proximity of the two events was unplanned.

“It just kind of happened that way,” she said.

CUAB will sponsor several other events during the last week of classes.

Some of these include a student stand-up comedy show, a film marathon and a concert by Mandolin Orange and Mipso Trio — which will happen hours before the Travis Porter show and is a rescheduling of the bands’ canceled concert in August.

“When you get down to the end of the semester, all of these things start to end up close together,” Hinton said.

Marquise Hudson, performing arts chairman for CUAB, said that though two Dec. 7 concerts would seem to imply LDOC-scale planning, their placement was accidental.

The original date for the Travis Porter show was not on the last day of classes but on Dec. 2, Hudson said.

“It’s all a coincidence that we’ve got so many things happening this week,” he said.

He also said that CUAB did not consider moving any of the events to the beginning of next semester in order to maintain the week’s variety of events.

CUAB was hesitant to apply an LDOC headline to the Dec. 7 events because it would garner comparisons to Duke’s student activities events, Hudson said.

“A lot of students don’t realize that even though Duke has these huge events, their budget is about three times ours,” he said.

“I mean, they had an $80,000 ‘Mad Men’ party in their library.”

Hudson said that as of 5 p.m. Monday, 497 of 600 available tickets for the Travis Porter show had been sold.

Ticket sales would bring in $9,000 if the show sells out.

CUAB receives one third of student organizations fees, about $13 per student per year.

Zoey LeTendre, program adviser for CUAB, said the organization’s budget at the start of the school year was $364,000.

Hudson said he’s wanted to bring Travis Porter to campus since that start.

“I just thought they’d be popular,” he said.

“They’re a southern rap group, and clearly, we’re in the south.”

Contact the Arts Editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.