The Ear Drum

Today while walking through campus, I noticed that a thing you don’t commonly see around are musical buskers.

A busker, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is a “person who entertains in a public place for donations”. Though there can be a variety of buskers, the most common is musical performers.

This brings me back to the point of a lack of buskers within UF. UF has numerous “free-speech” zones where students can perform activities to the public, but they are hardly utilized for music.

It could be the general ambivelance the average students feels while walking through a crowded place like Turlington Plaza. If students are unwilling to stop to listen to political campaigns, it is doubtful that they will stop to listen to one person crooning on a guitar.

Is busking dead at UF? No. Groups such as the Guitar Circle at UF and The Hip-Hop Collective, which performs the Turlington Takeover event, try to keep the spirit alive, but are mostly ignored unless they make a show of it.

What sums up the situation is that someone of the Guitar Circle said that after playing for three hours, he finally had enough to buy a soda from the vending machine.